Search Results

“... inexhaustible in its gathering of perceptions and engendering of conceits, might have led one to hope that his verse would display something of the same unstoppable vitality: yet his earlier volumes showed him to be, at best, a competent dabbler in the art, turning out trim little verses that appeared to perform, for him, a function equivalent to Ingres’s ...”

“... I felt her hatred. I could smell it, even hear it coming out of her, but I sneered again. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘Because there must be something pretty fine about a guy who rates your hatred.’ Then she said a strange thing; I remember it clearly. ‘I hope you die of heart failure,’ she said. ‘Right there in ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh was ‘received’ into Holy Mother Church; had been saluted by Edith Sitwell as the hope of English poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of ...”

“... of the shortlist for last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, Christopher Priest wrote on his blog that part of the award’s purpose is to prove to ‘the larger world’ that science fiction ‘is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many ...”

“... that make so much of the translated work intolerable. They may even offer the glimmer of a hope that, if Brodsky can overcome his natural impatience and settle down to learning his craft, he may become, not the great American poet of our time, but at least someone we can read with admiration and ...”

“... the only thing you can do when you can’t be sure whether the ice is going to crack or not is to hope that you’ll be putting on a rather pretty dance when it does crack, you know? These are among the thoughts which went to the making of Setting the World on Fire. ‘Whether the ice is going to crack’ is from the start the reiterated cold fear which is ...”

“... and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling argument that God is the Ultimate Boeing ...”

“... politicians to serve present purposes by rearranging light and shade on the historical picture. Christopher Addison, for example, published an edited version of his war diaries in 1934, just as he was trying to cut a figure as a Labour frontbencher. The originals had recorded the private thoughts of a man who expected to be on the winning side after the ...”

“... impure and apt to confuse issues: hence the justification of writing books about books, in the hope of straightening things out. Craig Raine has made several attempts, over more than thirty years, to straighten things out in favour of Eliot’s reputation. He has published six essays, by my count, towards that end, starting with an appreciation of The ...”

“... make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing, inward-bound mammoth of a book, where the author laboriously chronicles and inspects his every moment for changes in the moral and spiritual weather. Well, it can’t be his every moment, but it feels like it. Here ...”

“... as its poignant first words: ‘I am reaching an age when I had better collect the essays which I hope to preserve.’ There is the small accidental shock upon now meeting such innocent words as ‘She wanted to have no more bother,’ given that Empson came drily to relish as his own epitaph ‘No more bother.’ There is the resilience ...”

“... feeling for the differences between England and America; by a painful reluctance to abandon its hope that each might adopt something of the other’s wisdom; and by a confidence that we must newly see the truth of the old sense of things – namely, that the Englishman is the victim-beneficiary of a belief in the artist as amateur, and the American of a ...”

“... the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.’ There’s even a hope, however forlorn, of ‘extending the pitch and consciousness of human possibility’. Entranced by the discipline of accreting such sentences as ‘Systems planning is the true American artform’ or ‘Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting ...”

“... brain. “The Elizabethan joke ‘The Dance of the Sheets’ has, then, something in it.” “I hope his erection is all right” … and so on.’ Wherever he might have placed himself on the sexual spectrum if he hadn’t died at the age of 27, Brooke was, the letter leaves little doubt, a big show-off. Alan Hollinghurst has always had a soft spot for ...”

“... did not stumble or slither into war. They chose it: worse, they planned it in advance, in the hope of breaking out of their European isolation and launching a bid for world power. On this vexed question, MacMillan abstains from issuing a verdict. The historian’s task, she suggests, is not to judge but to understand. Was [the Kaiser] to blame for the ...”