Search Results

“... as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close friend. ‘Which hand am I, Mr President?’ Morgenthau asked. ‘My right hand,’ he replied, ‘but I keep my left hand under the table.’ Roosevelt’s presidency is superbly documented, yet the modern ...”

“... most often glossed as scriptural. But its other and earlier occurrence in the playwright is in III Henry VI. Warwick ‘the kingmaker’ proposes to replace the head of York, savagely set on the gates of the city by Margaret, with that of Clifford: From off the gates of Yorke fetch down the head, Your Father’s head, which Clifford placed there: In ...”

“... overcome a neurosis. He grew to the size of a Notre Dame linebacker, as the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray later estimated him, and his classmates learned to tolerate, even like him. Nicknamed ‘Father Abraham’ for his opinions on everything, and finally apprised of the fact that he would have to work if he was to excel, the sermonising Gymnasium ...”

“... his subjects – close enough to capture the warmth radiating from their skin. Novelists such as Henry James and Proust seem to want to reduce the distance between themselves and their characters virtually to nothing – to bore into their characters’ skulls and take us with them. Cather, rather more conservatively, locates herself about four or five feet ...”

“... dependency like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable ...”

“... stop sulking over transcendental necessities: they should loosen up, try to get out a bit more. In stead of trying to keep knowledge pure by shoring up the walls of Cartesianism, they should join the partying poets, artists and rainbow radicals who were exultantly pulling them down. Given time, even a philosopher could learn to enjoy being constituted by ...”

“... service of God. ‘Bound to obey and serve’ was the motto chosen by Jane Seymour when she became Henry VIII’s queen, echoing the glad subservience still proclaimed by the Prince of Wales’s heraldic emblem: Ich dien.The language of heraldry served as a constant reminder that to engage in service was not simply to undertake a prescribed form of labour, but ...”

“... and trills for the right hand, oompah for the left: a demi-style that would stand him in good stead when the act lay fallow, and assist an inborn facility for seducing whole lines of chorus girls. The result placed a built-in ceiling on his competence, but it worked nicely as a sight gag for the eye and ear. Harpo would emulate him in this as in other ...”