Search Results

“... in order to offset the desiccating effect of the documentary record. Katherine Duncan-Jones describes a bit of a shark in Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), and is very good at extracting plausible matter even from Aubrey’s anecdotes. She also adds lively and often credible dashes of speculation of her own, such as the suggestion that Shakespeare and ...”

“... of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of the imminent exhaustion of the nation’s coal supply. Drawing explicitly on Malthus, Jevons argued that the increased demand on resources from a growing population was forcing mines into deeper and more inaccessible seams. ‘We ...”

“... endeavour emerge from a seventy-page party scene in The Recognitions. The tortured composer Stanley talks about ‘living among palimpsests … double and triple palimpsests pile up and you keep erasing, and altering, and adding, always trying to account for this accumulation, to order it, to locate every particle in its place in one whole’. He feels ...”

“... so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of the Pre-Raphaelites’ (Burne-Jones breathes a sigh of relief), but ‘the nearest painting can get to bad breath’. Freud was always a painter of the Great Indoors. Even his horses are painted at home in their stables; and though he curated a great Constable show in Paris in 2003, the ...”

“... Beardsley told Smithers that the Peacock should ‘untiringly and unflinchingly attack the Burne-Jones and Morrisian medieval business’. Beardsley was committed to ‘usurpation’: he was determined to use the work of his elders and betters in his own manner, cleverly transporting it into a new and original style of his own – to outdo Morris at being ...”

“... jolly clubbable. Tolkien naturally knew the identity of the reviewer and wrote to his publisher, Stanley Unwin: ‘I must respect his opinion, as I believed him to be the best living critic until he turned his attention to me.’ Lewis and Tolkien loved nothing better than a club. The early years of the two men’s academic careers, before they even knew ...”

“... as well as important work on particular phases or aspects of the Bard’s life by Honigmann, Stanley Wells and others, but Shakespeare: A Life can make some claim to be the first sustained scholarly attempt on its subject since the books written by Edgar Fripp and E.K. Chambers in the Twenties. Its very existence is the symptom of a quiet renaissance in ...”

“... marriage plot’. As she says, the play works against the common Hollywood model characterised by Stanley Cavell as the ‘comedy of remarriage’. There is the quarrelsome bickering associated with the form, but no reconciliation. After Ruth is killed in a car accident intended by Elvira, who tampered with the car, to kill Charles, the two women form an ...”

“... but their hangers-on volunteering in the city militia were making use of the den. There were a few Stanley knives strewn about. The word ‘sistem’ was scrawled on a whiteboard. Nazar, who described himself as the ‘administrator’ of the shelter, said he and his men knew the city’s streets well enough to put up a good fight against the Russians. The ...”

“... he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only Aldrin. That ...”

“... stupid. Northrop Frye once observed that all conventions, as conventions, are more or less insane; Stanley Cavell once pointed out that the conventions of cinema are just as arbitrary as those of opera. Both those observations are brought to mind by video games, which are full, overfull, of exactly that kind of arbitrary convention. Many of these conventions ...”

“... Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of Brian Jones, but that story circulates very much as a cautionary tale rather than an airy fable, all too humanly squalid, with nothing mythic or fantastical about it. (Even a lowlife encyclopedist like myself emerges from any time spent reading about ...”

“... interests to them. US manufacturers such as Boeing, GE and Pepsi, banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan, and the insurance giant AIG all wanted the new market, and they wanted the cheap labour. From 1994, when the Clinton administration abandoned its hard line on the legacies of Tiananmen, the thrust of policy was to open up new markets and ...”

“... acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne was ...”

“... Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and following useful love affairs with Alain Delon, Bob Dylan and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, was determined to get into music one way or another. The Velvet Underground managed to sneak away from Warhol without utterly alienating him, and became a real rock band, albeit an unusual one, with ever-changing personnel. They ...”