Search Results

“... past, the Treasury contains too many mandarins, the Foreign Office has been unduly influenced by Lawrence of Arabia and by the years spent by officials among the Arabs. Downing Street in Perspective is a sequel to Inside Number Ten: it is the record of a thoroughly efficient secretary who did her utmost to see that life ran as smoothly as possible for her ...”

“... and Macke are shown looking in the direction of Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Rousseau, Sonia and Robert Delaunay. It wasn’t so much about France as it was about making oneself modern – which, at least up until the Second World War, was impossible without France. Nationalist painters and critics attacked Marc, Macke and their followers for selling Germany ...”

“... In 1916, D.H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith of his abiding ‘sadness’: ‘for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing’. Driving to Garsington, Ottoline Morrell’s country seat, he was overwhelmed with a sense of so much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming ...”

“... in these abstract Modernists. One of the many things that is so interesting about him, and that Robert Ferguson illuminates in this first thorough biography, is his redescription of original sin as the best way of talking about ineluctable human limitations. In his own combative, unacademic way he was trying to work out why original sin, even in its secular ...”

“... which he associates with the work of Williams, Young and Richard Hoggart, and before that of D.H. Lawrence, and which would appear here to have followed on a spell of postwar indifference. The working class is thought by these writers to be marked by a power of sympathy, of closeness and attachment, which makes them the emotional superiors of the rest of ...”

“... next year; photographs suggest that, like Walter De Maria’s lightning field in New Mexico and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, it will become one of those places of pilgrimage, which for one practical reason or another are very difficult to visit except in the imagination. They stand, those iconic works, as examples of art that cannot in the ordinary run ...”

“... magic: they look as if they have escaped from a dream. It’s probably true to say that before Lawrence Gowing organised a comprehensive exhibition of Hogarth at the Tate in 1971-2, very few people thought of him as one of the great European painters of the 18th century. The paintings were always overshadowed by the engravings, and one is inclined to think ...”

“... Dia now also oversees the mother of all earthworks, Spiral Jetty, a great coil of rocks built by Robert Smithson into the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970.Initially directed by Heiner Friedrich, a German dealer who had exhibited such artists in Cologne and in New York, Dia was funded by his wife, Philippa de Menil, daughter of Dominique de Menil, a major ...”

“... the St Andrews Classicist John Burnet (whose work on early Greek philosophy made an impact on Lawrence, Eliot, Pound and others); John Anderson, a Glasgow philosophy graduate of 1917 who emigrated to take up a Chair at Sydney University in 1927 and whose writings (fuelled, Davie argues, by the Scottish educational debate) are attracting increasing ...”

“... or somebody – some murderer – like that. He had probably misread a communication from Robert (The Great Terror) Conquest. Anyway, it is already pretty clear that one of the chief excitements of this publication will be in finding out who has been dumped on, and how badly. Few well-known names escape the Larkin lash and although Anthony Thwaite ...”

“... Stoll was on his second day on the job. He had just been hired as computer systems manager at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, a research facility for astrophysicists in Berkeley, California, and his first assignment was to discover why the computer’s books didn’t balance for the previous month. At first, the new systems manager assumed that the error had ...”

“... and at their worst, as when the chimney catches fire and neither Burgo, the Partridges’ son, nor Robert Kee, a much loved friend, stir from their armchairs to help put it out. Her approach to people is rather like her botanist’s approach – that these human creatures had been thrown up willy-nilly on the earth’s crust and must be treated with tender ...”

“... book. Instead, Said preferred to concentrate on writers like Sir Richard Burton, Lord Cromer, T.E. Lawrence, Gérard de Nerval and Renan, all good for self-damning soundbites, but whose influence on serious academic study of the history, languages and religions of the Middle East was pretty negligible. One cannot understand Lewis’s intellectual formation ...”

“... the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some misgivings. ‘The subject of the book,’ he said, ‘is political, though it is hard to tell whether the author’s sympathies are Communist or Fascist; they seem a little vaguely and sentimentally directed towards a “strong ...”

“... Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. ...”