Search Results

“... remote from those which measure human life and production: the time of geology, glaciers, crystal formation on the one hand, and of neurochemistry, photosynthesis, plant-life on the other. The poems unfold at different speeds, their landscapes are places of geological and historical process, of tribal migrations or demographical shifts; but they are ...”

“... prisons; ‘bluff John’ Prescott, the authentic voice of proletarian Old Labour, who made it ‘crystal clear’ to the 1993 Labour Party Conference that a Labour Government would renationalise the railways if the Tories privatised them, and promised, for instance, that the Birmingham relief road would be built ‘only over my dead body’, now, as Huff and ...”

“... up to Strasbourg and the 1997 batch of Lauderite fundamentalists down to Westminster – all still crystal-balling helplessly about what to do if England keeps saying “No!” to Commonwealth Status and Independence-in-Europe-under-the-Crown into the next Millennium.’ The Eclipse of Scottish Culture is far from lively, although it does a small ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... But it’s also possible to stick a bit more on. The gold collar worn by a 16th-century rock-crystal bird is there to keep its head on. If a single trunk did not serve, German limewood sculptors added a bit here and another bit there; even in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the integrity of the marble block (which, unlike limewood, was not destined to ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next to them, in apposition) ‘duplication which leads through democratic crowds to totalitarian unison’. I thought this was coming it a bit. There are only three outstretched arms in ...”

“... put in a picture. I think of Pissarro in South London in 1871, fitting Dulwich College and the Crystal Palace and the rows of decent semis into his pastoral. But I know that this reference moves me too close to the ‘nostalgia’ police. The terms I proposed at the start of my review were deliberately limited. Deciding who might be the best candidate for ...”

“... to games: exaggerating the hooligan problem allows Murdoch and club chairmen to fleece the fans. David Conn’s The Football Business is a damning analysis of commercialisation.1 His story starts at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 18 May 1992, when Sky Sports was in competition with Greg Dyke of ITV for the Premiership rights. ITV are said to have put up £262 ...”

“... of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). When, at the emotional climax of Disgrace (1999), David Lurie embraces his daughter to comfort her following her gang rape by three men, she is described as ‘stiff as a pole’. Long after she knows his name, Beatriz insists on thinking of Witold as ‘the Pole’: it’s one of the ways she has of keeping him ...”

“... wrong, either. What even Victorians regarded as Victoriana at its most ephemeral has outlived the Crystal Palace, the British Empire and Punch. No sooner is it diagnosed as terminal than it rallies and thrives. For half a century after Gilbert’s death in 1911, the operas were kept in the professional repertoire by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... ritual: the project of ritual is to make time stand still, as it has apparently stood still in David Rodinsky’s room in the Princelet Street Synagogue since the day, twenty-odd years ago, when he disappeared. (See Tale No Five, ‘The Solemn Mystery of the Disappearing Room’; see also Patrick Wright’s account of Rodinsky’s room in the LRB of 29 ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”