Search Results

“... by the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy ...”

“... of ‘historical London figures’ and ‘modern day heroes’. Ada (Lovelace), who worked with Charles Babbage on his ‘analytical engine’, is paired with Phyllis (Pearsall), the artist who claimed to have tramped three thousand miles in mapping streets for the A-Z. The most recent partnership, Jessica (Ennis) and Ellie (Simmonds), were christened, as ...”

“... Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage between the eternal verities of deep England and the world ocean. Drawing on the example of Hilaire Belloc’s The Historic Thames: A Portrait of England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a ...”

“... week at least, Wilde was as much an ordinary man as a flamboyant artist who willed his own demise. Charles Ricketts, who designed books for him, wrote that ‘most writers on Wilde see in him the aesthete, the predestined victim of a theory, and the martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other ...”

“... the land as something other than an endpoint for settlement. The treaty allowed settlers safe passage to territories further west, but an ample space for the Lakota seemed assured. In practice, the sheer number of miners traversing the territory, and the new mineral deposits discovered in Indian lands, made violations of this treaty and others an ...”

“... Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the hypocritical society matrons who obstruct their passage to wealth and status: their aversion seems grounded in Wharton’s own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting ...”

“... feelings. ‘Ambivalence has to be distinguished from having mixed feelings about someone,’ Charles Rycroft writes in his appropriately entitled A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: ‘It refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be ...”

“... RPF officials, many of whom I knew when they were still rebels, won’t return my calls. Finally, Charles Murigande, who is in charge of foreign affairs, comes to my hotel. I launch into a lengthy profession of good faith. He replies with a Rwandan proverb: ‘There’s no use drinking milk on a stomach full of hatred. It’ll throw up blood.’ With this, he ...”

“... a lifelong Chicagoan); they are insincere slackers and draft dodgers – in a word, liberals. The passage reminded Republicans of their party demographics, their strength in the exurbs, and prepared the ground for an assault on the metropolitan manners and mores of their Democratic opponents, in a depressingly effective piece of hokum. In Alaska, she has ...”

“... gives much sound advice about how to write so as to be understood. If Graves had applied to the passage from The White Goddess I’ve just quoted the principles set out in The Reader over Your Shoulder, he would have found in it a clear violation of Principle 5 (‘There should never be any doubt left as to when’), and probably of Principle 6 (‘There ...”

“... longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy Crouchback to make his fellow officers see what the war was really about?What is it, then, that makes Waugh a deviant in the history of our culture? Not, surely, that he was a man of the Right, an ...”

“... a rich and instructive experience.At an event in Berkeley, a man in the audience said there was a passage from the book he wanted to hear me read. During the intervening years, I have had such requests a handful of times, always from men, always involving a passage that turns out to have some kind of sexual content. But at ...”

“... thing in the world for Carlyle to have given a book to his mother. But the most significant passage comes shortly after he has been given the news of her death: ‘She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science but in the public history of my own country, in its ...”

“... has at moments appeared to be something of an illusion, or even his Achilles’ heel. Despite the passage of the healthcare bill, it remains to be seen whether rhetoric can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the realities of political power. And that is not to speak of the lethal counter-enthusiasm, the ugly, race-tinted hatreds ...”

“... would also have been ‘prepared’ by notes supplied to an earlier printing of Moby Dick by Charles Feidelson, in which he refers us to the infidel queen of death, who puts in an appearance only three brief chapters earlier, and, more intricately, to what Ahab, closer by, calls his ‘unknown mother’. My own contribution, if it hasn’t already been ...”