Search Results

“... to find a place for Flaubert in her own work. Something similar happens when she outsources some savage comedy from Ödön von Horváth for another piece. It’s as if she worries that a couple of twists from the peppermill of irony are needed to boost the piquancy of the book. Luckily she’s droll and companionable on the page, with no need to enlarge her ...”

“... drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or middle of the road about these extremist fictions. They do not fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the ...”

“... has already been said. Photographs are details, and to be modern ‘is to live, entranced, by the savage autonomy of the detail’. Photography understood as art can ask us ‘to stare at banality and also to relish it, drawing on the very developed habits of irony that are affirmed by the surreal juxtapositions of photographs typical of sophisticated ...”

“... the other, black for Whitechapel or Spitalfields, conjuring a ‘dark continent’ whose ignorant, savage tribes, like those elsewhere in the British Empire, needed the clarifying light of Christian missionaries or exposure to scientific reason.The maps were imaginative artefacts as much as scientific documents. In the new folio they have been ...”

“... his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged himself, which, as Keay remarks, was excellent training for being towed by the throat behind Tibetan ponies. Worse things than that supposedly happened to him in the Himalayas, where he ‘took to heart ...”

“... would have been much better placed to think about these matters had they been able to consult Anne Buck’s Dress in 18th-century England (1978), whose immense range of sound research makes it far more easy to draw out the cultural meanings of dress, on and off the stage. Nicoll’s capacity to deal with all the things he leaves out cannot be ...”

“... the 13th century, has exercised an incalculable influence on Christian ideas about sanctity; its savage accounts of martyrdoms conjure images in the mind’s eye more like the covers of slasher movies in video shops than anything pious, while its unabashed anti-semitism prefigures modern demons of another kind. The Golden Legend was approved literature for ...”

“... Lancelot. The diffusion of personal names can indicate a saint’s waxing or waning popularity. St Anne, the Virgin’s mother, became popular only in the later Middle Ages, as did Mary Magdalene – hence the founding of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1458 and Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1542. We find very few medieval Josephs: the foster father of Jesus ...”

“... name is one with glory’. Surely, in his own country, he wouldn’t permit the ‘savage destruction of a small unoffending Jewish family’. Eisenhower might indeed have preferred to save her – ‘it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in the case where a woman is to receive capital punishment,’ he told his son – but he feared ...”

“... cannot be sung. His operatic approach is, however, at the opposite pole to that of, say, the poet Anne Ridler, who meticulously produces ‘singing’ (syllabically integral) versions of Monteverdi’s stage works, and leaves her own artistic preoccupations to one side. The clarification of literary means effected by Muldoon, apparently on behalf of opera, is ...”

“... got engaged to a younger, richer woman; Lolly nursed an affection for Louis Purser, which ended in savage embarrassment. Their friendship had grown so intense that she assumed he felt as she did; then he kissed her goodbye after a visit, and she thought that this meant that they were engaged, and wrote to her English friend Emmeline Cadbury to tell her ...”

“... within it, The Corrections sets itself apart from the work of contemporary American writers like Anne Tyler for whom the family never stopped being central. As well as looking inwards to family dynamics of love, hate and mutual incomprehension, Franzen looks outwards to the worlds of corporate power, government policy, science, economics and national ...”

“... ogling chinless face, his scimitar-like mouth with its rows of gleaming teeth, the relentless and savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught …And so on. Yet shark attacks are an exotic rarity. There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to ...”

“... Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, Drew Barrymore, Kirsten Dunst, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet, but no matter: none of them has achieved the range and starry power that Kidman still possesses, despite a string of recent disappointments – Cold Mountain, The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter, Bewitched. Bullock ...”

“... learn, ‘a human bloodhound from a race of brigands’. As Goldsworthy points out, the cut-throat savage from the mountains is still with us: That writing about the Balkans is a free-for-all, with no inhibitions about political correctness, is shown in a recent editorial in the Evening Standard which – following the news that Albania was to hold a ...”