Search Results

“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... Osolinski, Chlaus Lotscher. Wonderful names, evocative names. Columns of them. Rolling credits reading like some disconcertingly sensuous concrete poem. The colour shots are very striking, in a Tokyo-printed, fat-magazine kind of way; that slightly self-conscious excellence of serious investment lurking behind a noble topic ...”

“... may appear over-ingenious, when stated in this bald way. For it is only in the process of reading that we can take account both of the risk that Pinget runs, and of his success in guarding against it. ‘But the explanations after the event could only diminish, if not reduce to nothing, the importance of the writings in question,’ reads the ...”

“... the group, developed a love-hate relationship with it wrote papers on it which became required reading inside the group, and above all, worked endless hours building an electronic storehouse of Orwellian proportions. The BKA’s staff was doubled to 3536, its budget quintupled, and it assembled computer files on 4.7 million people and 3100 ...”

“... and his father, whose hair ‘stuck up at the back, just as Harry’s did’). And where both Peter Pan and Mary Poppins taught children to fly or float by thinking happy thoughts, Rowling takes the concept into a more sinister area. Harry learns that the only way to defend himself against the Dementors, who will destroy him by assuming the form of what ...”

“... whom Vico credited with providing this information. In this case as in many others, Vico’s reading of an ancient text was less philological than imaginative. In the Germania, a short, vivid description of the country and customs of the ancient Germans, Tacitus noted that their towns, unlike Roman cities, did not consist of blocks of houses in the midst ...”

“... writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narrative, and there’s no shortage of first-person writing here, but little autobiography in conventional terms: ‘My abdominal aorta is normal. My bladder works. Haemoglobin ...”

“... out in her excellent Editing Emily Dickinson (2008), to edit Dickinson is to offer a critical reading that is inevitably shaped by the preoccupations of the time; no doubt Susan Howe’s declaration in The Birth-mark (1993) that Dickinson’s ‘manuscripts should be understood as visual productions’ will at some point in the future seem as wholly of ...”

“... by press photographers. In school, he did well in science but was bored by most of the assigned reading, and his prospects for college were sunk by a cumulative average of 67. The disappointment mattered less than it might have done: by his senior year, Kubrick had begun placing photographs in Look magazine. A regular position there would support him over ...”

“... Go away a little closer, Idiot Boy. I’ve got all the recent books on the subject. But reading books – and there have been droves over the past decade – seems only to deepen the confusion. Witness Create, a glossy catalogue published to coincide with a major show of Outsider Art at the Berkeley Art Museum this spring. However beautifully put ...”

“... work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South things.’ This is October 1967. I can’t see how Flannery O’Connor (which he perhaps thought was a pen name) could be so easily dismissed by someone ...”

“... well-known personalities from history, like Robespierre or Thomas Cromwell). You might start reading Bedford for the food and the celebrity gossip, but you reread for the thrilling materiality, ‘concrete and fastidious’, as she herself once suggested, of her prose: odd, elaborate framings and risky hanging slabs of dialogue; locutions that started ...”

“... the best succinct introduction to the poetry is Joseph Brodsky’s extraordinary close reading of one poem, ‘A New Year’s Greeting’, which appeared first in Russian and was then translated for his book of essays Less Than One (1986). Entitled with deceptive modesty ‘Footnote to a Poem’, this is an introduction not only to Tsvetaeva’s ...”

“... you ever didn’t want to know about Brando is available in this rambling, ghosted tale. Reading it is like waking up in the morning next to last night’s dream lover and realising you brought the bar-room bore home with you. The trick is to go back to their place and leave before they wake. Songs My Mother Taught Me is the breakfast too far. But ...”