Search Results

“... appears in the ephemerae isn’t necessarily ephemeral. Not all reviews are written lefthandedly by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work ...”

“... It was once observed by J.B. Priestley that the literary life in England was ‘a rat-race without even a sight of the other rats’. English authors on the whole prefer to work on their own and find their friends outside the confraternity – indeed, because of this preference, there is hardly such a thing as a confraternity ...”

“... polyglot, as has been our fate and our milieu ever since the divine autocracy showed its muscle by toppling the monolingual Tower of Babel’. And yet, for all the grandeur of these moments, Epstein’s perspective will strike cis-Atlantic readers as myopic. British publishing gets one brief and misspelt mention in Epstein’s conspectus of the trade, Book ...”

“... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...”

“... It will fade ... Or, from a poem about being 65: Strange that obsessive observation seems To be an overture to verse ... The habit was deprecated much earlier: In this the thirty-ninth year of my age ... it seems That any old subject fits into my verse. Among the New Poems, published when he was still under sixty but already complaining regularly of ...”

“... sense, here in the States, that poetry is no longer a vital cultural force, a feeling encouraged by the recent announcement by the National Endowment for the Arts that over the previous 12 months almost 92 per cent of American adults had read no poetry at all. What role, I wondered, can poetry play in such an ...”

“... account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia. His title, The Missing Will, refers not only to his aboulia but also to an agreeable fantasy of his mother’s: she was an almost illiterate but very pretty Yorkshirewoman, called Bertha Wharton, who had ...”

“... he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are equal”’, and urged his descendants to rebel against the socialist dictatorship he saw as inevitable: ‘People can begin systematically to break small regulations, and ...”

“... At the Grammy awards the other week, an unusual note was struck by Michael Greene, a record industry bigwig. The only real point of interest at most award ceremonies is the frocks (and sometimes, admittedly, the hair), so it was a break with tradition when Greene and his tuxedo launched into the subject of Internet piracy ...”

“... furiously at work on an unwieldy treatise is a staple of his fiction (in JR a character named Jack Gibbs struggles over this very text), and over the years he wrote several essays on related themes (now collected with other occasional pieces in The Rush for Second Place). Then, in early 1997, Gaddis was diagnosed with terminal cancer, which prompted him ...”

“... too numerous and too mundane to mention: the Mister Kiplings, the Messrs Cadbury and McVitie, the Jack Daniels, the Sainsburys, the Guinnesses, the Marks and the Spencers, and of course dear old Mister Gordon and his fine distillery. These many named and unnamed of the acknowledgment pages are the foundations on which a book is built: they help to determine ...”

“... Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature.’ Compound terms using ‘self-’ often raise questions about agency and responsibility. When we ...”

“... arm badges from each of these misty regions, but whenever I surveyed these trophies I was seized by a nagging doubt. Had I really been abroad, or not? Cornwall and Wales, despite some convincingly bizarre place names, seemed much like my grandparents’ North Yorkshire only more so, being about 110 per cent Methodist. Scotland was unlike Cornwall and Wales ...”

“... desert, violet and dun, to the biblical meadows, the pretty colours and the plenty that will be California. The art direction of that great trek westwards was perfect – art direction usually is. And now here comes Joan Didion, a little bit like the doomsayer on the wagon train (Walter Brennan, with teeth), but too arresting to ...”

“... shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times over the last fifteen years. (Once, during a strained public conversation in Waterstone’s, Charing Cross Road, we had been interrupted by a foam-flecked out-patient ...”