Search Results

“... movements as ‘characters’ in some of his fiction. How is this to be reconciled with the frank dominance of a single character – a male narrator – in each of the novels since Breakfast of Champions? Shortly after the author, as a character in this novel, has uttered his resolve to make every person exactly as important as any other he hears a ...”

“... over Gussie Bethell as evidence of his being ‘on the rebound’ (‘he had never really got over Frank’), yet when the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò flees from the Lady Jingly Jones after she has rejected his proposal of marriage, it’s possible that he’s on the rebound in the opposite direction. He whispers sweet nothings to a large and lively turtle: ‘You’re ...”

“... said, as he turned the Shenandoah Valley into a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads. Frank Vizetelly was in the neighbourhood, reporting and drawing (as he had been throughout the war) for the Illustrated London News. ‘The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of ...”

“... tried it closer to home at least once. On 1 August 1939 Kathleen and her friend Julia Vickers met Frank Martin, who took them driving around Charleston, West Virginia in his grey Packard convertible. At Valley Bell Dairy he bought them cheese, and at Dan’s Beer Parlor he got them pints. Kathleen said they ought to rent a room somewhere; it would cost ...”

“... secretive. On the other, he does not want us to set any store by such observations. He is also frank about his role as a maker who touches things up: he is obviously painting a romantic ‘portrait’. The same unnamed narrator praises the candour of Pechorin’s diaries (‘this man who so relentlessly displayed his personal weakness and defects for all ...”

“... Cream for firming the neck and bust’. Arden’s own salons were taking off, as women watched close-ups of heavily made-up stars in the cinema and decided, helped by advertising in glossy magazines and brilliant public relations, that the ‘mark of sex and sin’ was worth the price. By 1927 American women were buying 52,000 tons of cleansing ...”

“... I’m its current biographer.’ With the publication of The Golden Age, the biography draws to a close. The novels which comprise it, to list them in order of the historical periods they cover, are Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976, of course), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), Washington, DC (1967) and now The Golden Age. According to Vidal’s ...”

“... many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left had begun to wear thin. The LRB, which appeared to be moving leftward (in reality, Britain had moved to the right), stayed with him, and tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed loudly, often ...”

“... but from her determination to avoid touching the two madnesses as they guided her, pressing too close to her and narrowing her path into a very thin line. She always walked in straight lines. She went from where she was to the place where she was going, and then back again to the place where she had been.The rhythm of the long middle sentence gauges the ...”

“... were the primary victims, especially but not exclusively in the relatively lawless west. After it, close to 75 per cent of lynchings were in the deep South; more than 90 per cent of the victims were black. There were other lynchings, of course: mobs murdered an unknown number of Mexicans – in the thousands – by hanging, burning and shooting, particularly ...”

“... and having much in common with the easy, unshowy critical penetration of Watt’s contemporary Frank Kermode. But, as his intellectual trajectory suggests, considerable scholarly resources stood surety for this agreeable surface manner. As Watt reflected, his aim had been ‘to transcend what I had learned from the idealist modes of German thought by ...”

“... real live specimens of the Protestant beast, they had initially followed the opinion of Loyola’s close colleague Pierre Favre that dealing with Protestants should be a matter of Christian witness, ‘speaking with them familiarly on those topics which we have in common and avoiding all contentious arguments in which one party might seem to beat the ...”

“... accurately: this minor self-deception), what I said came – as it were by chance – dangerously close to what the addressee wanted to hear. What was particularly absurd was my motive in this manoeuvre, at least my conscious and admitted motive. It was not the hope that it would lead to anything, but merely a kind of professionally intellectual and somewhat ...”

“... new in the early part of the 20th century. To this we must add that the physician required a close knowledge of what good nurses were able to do (Lewis’s mother had trained as a nurse): ‘The nurses had their own profession, their own schools and their own secrets.’ Lewis’s father is the protagonist of the chapter ‘1911 Medicine’: Lewis ...”

“... made out of marijuana, which meant that you didn’t have to inhale if you didn’t desire.) Frank Aller, the brilliant scholar of China who was one of the chief ornaments of that address, later took his despair and disillusion to the length of self-slaughter. Most were more sanguine. I don’t especially remember Bill Clinton, perhaps because he was one ...”