Search Results

“... perhaps Blake used the copper plate as a sketchpad, as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography. Michael Phillips’s replicas of the original plates testify to the artist’s industry and also to the devotion of modern Blakeans. The lay observer can hardly bear to contemplate the toil involved in all that neat, packed engraving, let alone in having to do ...”

“... in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, George Cukor’s in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, Frank Pierson’s in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and Cooper’s now with himself and Lady Gaga, alias Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – are remarkably faithful to their initial premise and themes. They are about ...”

“... her job prospects. ‘Life is expensive,’ she tells the children. One day she takes her son Mason with her to class and introduces him to her professor (Marco Perella), an obnoxious fellow in love with his own fading charm. Just another day in the life, it seems. But then when the professor asks Arquette if she might be able to find a baby-sitter for ...”

“... Pynchon’s early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking role for Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. But here on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit and The ...”

“... he hadn’t made such characters up himself? The malefactor, for good measure, is played by James Mason in his best suave, sneering manner. The movie would be worth seeing just for the pleasure of watching him and Grant face off, aided and abetted by Hitchcock’s camera and timing, and Ernest Lehman’s wonderful script. There is a remarkable scene in the ...”

“... Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to his hotel room to have sex, as he hopes, with his under-age stepdaughter. Quilty, having mysteriously divined most of ...”

“... At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good’. A voice, apparently coming from nowhere, says: ‘You wonder? That’s all? What about “care”? Don’t you care?’ The surveyors explain to the voice that surveying is what they do ...”

“... stories of his aunts, ‘La Prissy’ and ‘La Hetty’, two sisters married to two brothers (a mason and a memorial mason), his sister Tabitha (‘La Tabby’), his same-age cousins Horace and Raymond. We get two world wars (‘Two is one too many for any man. Now I sit and wait for the third’); one German ...”

“... rooms and courtyards that looks as if it was designed by De Chirico rather than any medieval mason, and it complements the fog because, as the movie keeps showing us, it is all too easy to get lost among straight lines. When Macbeth has his second meeting with the witches (the one where they tell him that ‘none of woman born’ can do him any harm and ...”

“... in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass ...”

“... of an ending world, not just an ending life; and it is half-baked as well as magnificent. James Mason is Johnny McQueen, a wounded IRA gunman on the run – well, not exactly on the run, since he can hardly walk. He staggers from air-raid shelter to temporary respite in a house; from there to a horse-drawn cab and from there to a junkyard; he finally meets ...”

“... that he is in some sense ‘unclean’. The McIvors’ nearest neighbour and friend, Barney Mason, is particularly anxious, and his unscrupulous roust-about, Andy McKillop, who sees two black men visit Gemmy and talk with him, plays on these fears. There is a night raid. Gemmy is abducted, beaten, and only saved from drowning by Jock. He is removed to ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... or on the huddled masses, during these peak years of Italian emigration? The scholar Eudo Mason described Rilke as ‘not driven by indignation at the injustice of society, nor even, at least not principally, by human sympathy, but by absolute horror’. As the poet himself wrote of Malte, his task was ‘to make things from fear’. The ...”