Search Results

“... it. Both Kinsey and Reich were investigated by the FBI, itself, according to Kinsey’s biographer James Jones, ‘possibly the only American Institution more obsessed with sex than the Institute for Sex Research’. What does it say about our own times that a mainstream Hollywood movie about Kinsey – a man who died almost fifty years ago – can still be ...”

“... Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name entered his head. The public first heard of Metroland in 1915, when the railway used it in a penny ...”

“... There are​ self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist – he was studying for a theology degree at Oxford at the time – without knowing whether he was capable of being one, perhaps even without considering absence of talent a potential obstacle ...”

“... flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is Holbein’s portrait of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VI; he’s not the weed that he’s normally pictured but a big solid bully of a baby, the image of his father. On the Underground R. says he’s never known a poster so persistently defaced, the child’s brutal look seeming to irritate people. One poster ...”

“... and backbiting. Should he become more of a courtier and build on his ode sung at the Coronation of Edward VII (or rather, as he observed, not sung, by a choir which gawped at the King in the procession as he left the Abbey)? No, he found the boredom of Court life unendurable, and after he had stood night after night after dinner talking in the smoking-room his ...”

“... But it was also from the outset an idea with a conservative aspect, most famously articulated by James Madison in the debates about the United States constitution, when he argued that a national government was better placed than individual state legislatures to mitigate the petty selfishness of local interests and popular pressure groups, and that therefore ...”

“... the private members’ bill in the Lords that led two years later to the Sexual Offences Act.) Sir Edward Boulton, ‘baronet-stockbroker’, was gagged, bound and robbed by a guardsman he’d met in a pub and invited back to his flat for a conversation about ‘landscape gardening’. This delicately ludicrous detail quite possibly conveys the actual pick-up ...”

“... be very high. So, predictably enough, it has been with the United Nations. Readers approaching James Traub’s and Stanley Meisler’s books thus have reason to expect the worst. In some ways the expectation is amply fulfilled, but in others the two books – each by a journalist – cast more light on the UN than is normally allowed to fall on it. The ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... theoretical edge of human thought. Regis can even explain the quality of an excitement like this. James Gleick’s Chaos tells an exhilarating tale. It starts a quarter of a century ago with work on weather forecasting by Edward Lorenz and finishes with an account of the penetration of ‘chaos’ research into sciences as ...”

“... found everywhere in American writing, from Cooper to Emerson, from Twain to Whitman, and Henry James, from Dreiser to Willa Cather and on to Mailer. Lawrence’s two Englishwomen, Lou Witt and her acerbic mother, are to be found at the end of the story in the deserts of New Mexico, where the younger woman, like the New England woman who occupied the ranch ...”

“... its provenance’, but never quite decides what it does seek to be. Judicious selections from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or ...”

“... less likely than Faulkner’s to be snatched into a metaphysical empyrean. She doesn’t, as Henry James would say, ‘cultivate the high pitch and beat the big drum’. What interests her is not so much their existential dilemmas as their physical and moral landscape, the enclosing objects, in which she allows herself virtually to disappear: their domestic ...”

“... is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the ...”

“... further in a sepulchral world of its own. Even then, the couple’s only way was probably out: an Edward VIII-plus solution, with its terminal implications for the future of the institution. After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ...”