Search Results

“... was at the centre of his ambitious lexicographical project. Every entry in the OED drew on the reading history of at least one of thousands of volunteers who found and sent in quotations that were, and remain, the dictionary’s bedrock, and from which successive generations of editors have teased out fine-grained definitions and differences in sense. The ...”

“... The Australian film-maker Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is set in Djakarta shortly before the failed Communist coup of 1965. The story concerns three characters: Guy Hamilton, a half-Australian, half-American reporter working on his first big assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Jill Bryant, English assistant to the British military attachè; and Billy Kwan, a dwarf-like photographer who is half-Australian, half-Chinese, and who takes secret photographs and keeps lengthy files on the other characters, especially the ones he cares about ...”

“... their language, distorted how they looked at the world and at themselves. Yet, as both Judd and Peter Marshall demonstrate, neither Parliament nor the public ever gave Empire much conscious and sustained attention except when things were going hideously wrong and/or when they themselves were directly involved. Thus there were English colonies in America ...”

“... wife. ‘Now we shall never know.’ The regular scenario for many of Barry’s jokes concerned St Peter at the gates of Heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.24 February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the ...”

“... life, most of them rare visitors except for Joan Rodker, in whose flat Doris had lived with Peter, her four-year-old son, while they organised demonstrations and international ‘peace’ meetings. If anyone asked later if she’d been a member of the Communist Party, Doris would give a deep sigh at having to tell it yet again, and explain she was never ...”

“... but his Odes from Trigram in 1978 were a new and estranging poetry, which called for very adroit reading. Ranter, a sequence from 1985, created another raiding, fleet-foot persona, ‘loping, running, retrieving’ through a landscape constructed out of North-East and Border landscapes and history. The persona of the Ranter was timely: he was a ...”

“... afford an ideal barometer of cultural health – better, for example, than any study of reading habits. Called in today to construct a serious radio network, which criteria would one adopt? How to ensure a balance of programmes at a level neither hopelessly specialised nor afraid of intellectual challenge; how to decide on their length and ...”

“... There can be no new reader, and therefore perhaps no wholly new reading of the collection of stories known as The Arabian Nights. Not because they have been exhausted by retelling and explication, but because we always seem to have encountered them, or some of them, already, somewhere else, at some other time in our lives we are not able quite to pin down ...”

“... darling little bloke, always laughing, tumbling, doing his tricks’. The séances make cloying reading, deliberately so: this is the public, sanitised version of life ‘beyond black’. Alison’s performances, in village halls and frowsy civic buildings, are enervatingly banal: ‘Oh you’re so lovely . . . Such a lovely, warm and understanding ...”

“... what Rainey, in one of his strategically chilling phrases, terms ‘discursive hegemony’. Their reading of the poem was not the ‘close reading’ since practised by generations of scholars and students, but a ‘not-reading’: a grasp of its meaning and value as a commodity in the ...”

“... In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six before 1640. His other long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was less popular, but it, too, circulated far more widely than any of the plays, appearing in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640 ...”

“... shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which lie in heaps around is awful.’ Only a fortnight earlier he had told his mother: ‘do not worry about me. I am very happy; it is a great ...”

“... likeable and interesting, as indeed they mostly were. At the top, virtually in the roof, there was Peter Cadogan, left-wing humanist and champion of lost causes; a typographer, a batique artist and a dress designer, inter alia, occupied the middle floors; and in the basement there lived the late and much lamented Barry Carman, Australian-born author and writer ...”

“... the largest and most influential professional organisation of its type in the world. A closer reading of the Time article shows that it is not so much psychiatry – ‘psychological medicine’, as it is often called in this country – as psychoanalysis, ‘Freud’s Wunderkind’, whose claims are being questioned. In his study of Freud and the ...”

“... and Ronald Reagan. The present volume, in other words, would make soothing bedside reading for Mrs Margaret Thatcher, not least because its opening contribution comes from her favourite TV star and economist, Milton Friedman, the man for whom the British economy is now what St Paul’s was to Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum ...”