Search Results

“... painted water-colours which he then gave, as it they were musical scores, to his composer friend, Thomas von Hartmann, who selected one and, so to speak, played it. Then a third friend, the dancer, Alexander Sacharoff, joined them and improvised a dance to the music, concluding by pointing to that painting which he felt best expressed what he had just ...”

“... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do ...”

“... of Expenditure’, an essay published in 1933, Bataille, basing himself freely on the ethnologist Marcel Mauss’s description of ‘potlatch’ in primitive societies, sketches out a theory for a social and psychological economy of ‘waste’ rather than an economy of production. The same argument is amplified in the much later book La Part Maudite (1949 ...”

“... looking at Rothko. How many other high-powered critical works, I wonder, have Buñuel next to Sir Thomas Browne in the index, or Stan Getz, next to Giotto? Bowie is also something of a barometer for the Proust climate. In an inaugural lecture given in London in 1978, he urged his hearers to read Proust. In an inaugural lecture given in Oxford 15 years ...”

“... effect on the reader, and the many pages that follow about Surrealist exhibitions, fetishism and Marcel Duchamp’s overpraised and over-expounded peepshow Etant donnés give the lie to his bold rejection of the movement. Somewhere along the slow descent into the mine a different book was left behind. Smith admits confusion about i-doll-atry – is it a ...”

“... neither here nor there but I may as well admit that too. And then I read The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, an anti-Freudian Holocaust novel. My parents had it. I remember the passage on the letter scene in Eugene Onegin. (The heroine performs Tatiana.) I also remember the horrifying passage on Babi Yar, where the heroine dies, and where in reality many of my ...”

“... Beckett and others’, and read now mainly for Beckett’s contribution. The other essays are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second ...”

“... dare criticise the black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. That would come as news to Cornel West, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Pankaj Mishra, all of whom have publicly criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if ...”

“... making a living. She writes rather well about this notion of sacrifice, quoting Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, two late 19th-century writers on the general subject of sacrifice. They wrote, according to Feldman, that the victim ‘somehow has to be ravaged in a solemn but devastating way … The end goal is to sanction the victim so as to authorise him for a ...”

“... on some sort of thesis, her ideal mode of transport I suppose a cork-lined carriage. The ‘Marcel Proust’ might be a good name for a train. 16 May. Philip Roth’s face in a photograph by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt. 30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people knows ...”

“... him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, The Indignant Generation, was a formidable history of black ...”

“... symbol to Adorno was the figure of the ageing, deaf and isolated composer that it turns up in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – Adorno gave Mann a great deal of help with the novel – in the form of a lecture on Beethoven’s final period given by Adrian Leverkühn’s composition teacher, Wendell Kretschmar: Beethoven’s art had overgrown ...”

“... market, as he understood it. In 1873, he tells Tissot he is working on a picture specifically for Thomas Agnew; he also thinks that the firm might like to handle his early masterpiece Portraits dans un bureau, since it depicted the New Orleans cotton exchange; he presumed that Agnew’s, which had started in Manchester, would easily find a ...”

“... graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic ...”

“... Proust both begin on the frontiers of dreams. It is in the gap between sleeping and waking where Marcel is trying to place his surroundings that Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a beetle and Joseph K finds himself under arrest. ‘Metamorphosis’ and The Trial are the two works of Kafka that are best-known, are, if you like, classics. Classics ...”