Search Results

“... of a Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has included Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, James Hum ham and Russell Kirk perhaps overstresses the origin of these conflicts in individual idiosyncrasies. For conflict and contradiction are at the heart of the principles of American intellectual ...”

“... première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of molesting and murdering a white female employee.) Atlanta was the headquarters of the powerful Twenties’ Klan, which augmented the negrophobia of ...”

“... Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the game,’ the Times journalist Jenni Russell complained on Newsnight. It was a metaphor, and it wasn’t. Corbyn was being tested: not on his policies, which have hardly been at issue so far, but on his willingness and capacity to play the role of modern political leader. Would he – could ...”

“... that I hadn’t realised could exist: its intertwined plots, its stories within stories, its frank contemplation of mental illness and suicide. It was the first book I ever read that was about a writer, the first with a mentally unstable narrator, the first that employed metafiction, the first that was discursive and philosophical by design. I would ...”

“... F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. For me, at a Wimbledon grammar school in the 1950s, Bertrand Russell filled the slot on his own, largely because his History of Western Philosophy was so long. But by the end of my first year at university I had read at least two books by each of French’s three. We belonged to the Meritocracy, products of the school ...”

“... small holdings were neither practical nor sustainable. In 1848, Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord John Russell: ‘It is useless to disguise the truth that any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation, and that this change necessarily implies a long, continued and ...”

“... season, Coward belonged to the very last Victorian generation. There had been an older brother, Russell, who died a year earlier from meningitis, and a younger one, Eric, who was fated, like their father, to play a largely non-speaking part in the drama of Noël and Violet’s long and often troubled relationship. What Noël owed his father was his musical ...”

“... of Henry Lawson’s 1892 classic. Bail approaches Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ through Russell Drysdale’s well-known painting of the same name. In Lawson, the wife finds a strength of her own while maintaining a firm sense of connection with her absent drover husband. In Bail, the wife has run off with the drover, abandoning her suburban dentist ...”

“... articles on contemporary architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. The architects were themselves portrayed as playboys, the architectural and sexual revolutions intimately enmeshed. In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciado writes that in 1950s issues of Playboy, ‘there were more architecture ...”

“... out the utopian promise of ‘World Peace’. In The Impact of Science on Society (1952), Bertrand Russell similarly conjectured that a scientific society could be stable only if there was a single world government. The World Wide Web currently lacks the formal structure required to achieve higher-level consciousness, but might it be re-engineered to ...”

“... synthesis of naked commerce and organic architecture’ as foreseen by Louis Sullivan, mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright. The basic unit of the skyscraper is the ‘cell’: ‘We take our cue from the individual cell, which requires a window with its separating pier, its sill and lintel, and we, without more ado, make them look all alike because they are all ...”

“... at the funeral of a colleague. (A jocosely Irish project, this: Terry Wogan, Eamonn Andrews, Frank Delaney and Henry Kelly are to be your actual bearers of the fictional body.) Then he accepts an invitation to speak at the annual dinner of the Alma Tadema Society, founded to boost the decaying fortunes of an aged RA, and used by some of its exotic ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the Atlantic, so that he could fix ...”

“... tall, elegant ‘professional women’ who were stars in their own right: Alexis Smith, Rosalind Russell, Eve Arnold – women who could perch casually on the edge of an editorial desk, toss one long silk-stockinged leg over the other while lighting a cigarette or consulting a powder compact. Graceful and expensive as racehorses, they were amused, ironic and ...”

“... Although often assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of ...”