Search Results

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... notes and drawings he had made of English Gothic, English brickwork and warehouse construction. David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann have edited these notes, interleaving them with Schinkel’s letters home to his wife and they have added contemporary illustrations from other sources, showing places and artifacts referred to in the text. Enhanced by the two ...”

“... to mobilise the non-Thatcherite majority into a broad and effective electoral coalition. If this means an electoral pact or electoral reform – with all that implies – then so be it. The third argument was no doubt unpalatable to the more triumphalist wing of the Marxist Left, and still is to many in the Labour Movement. It is easy to see why. Hobsbawm ...”

“... two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and Camilla are also veteran walkers-out at the theatre. ‘Before ten minutes of the first scene had elapsed we were up out of our seats ... We just wanted somewhere quiet to sit where we could talk over the insult that had just been delivered to ...”

“... original contribution to biology. Further, the contribution itself was of an unusual kind. Unlike David Lack’s classic Life of the Robin – also an original contribution in popular form – The Selfish Gene reports no new facts. Nor does it contain any new mathematical models – indeed it contains no mathematics at all. What it does offer is a new world ...”

“... provide. The signs now are of a swing back to a different, more literal translation of the Bible. David Rosenberg’s The Book of J (1990) reads very differently from things like the Good News Bible or the Revised English Bible: The man named his wife Hava: she would have all who live, smooth the way, mother.     Now Yahweh made clothes from skins of ...”

“... acted as a guide, compiled for an unnamed milordo in about 1766 a summary of sage advice: on the means and cost of transport, food (beware of salads with too much oil but ‘a cold tongue or a piece of roast beef in the chaise will prove an excellent companion’), clothing (black velvet coat and Lyon silk waistcoat for winter), necessary medicines, company ...”

“... for Mallory and Irvine having made it to the top? Before last year, this was unproven (but by no means disproved). It remains so still, even now that Mallory has been found, tantalisingly, with his watch and altimeter broken, without a camera, with his goggles in his pocket. Ironically, we may never know more; even if another expedition goes back, as is ...”

“... of uncharismatic right-wing leaders came to an end with the accession to the party leadership of David Cameron, a smoother, less straightforward kind of Conservative. Cameron recognised that if he was to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, loosen its association with uncaring Thatcherite economics, then he needed to explode the assumption that the Conservatives ...”

“... It was ‘odd’, he said, to deny that Islam was the central element of the various struggles. David Cameron has moved in the same direction. The day after the 7/7 attacks, when he was shadow education secretary, he said that ‘the Muslim community in this country doesn’t support what is happening.’ Earlier this year he modified that remark, arguing ...”

“... study, which followed a cohort of 17,000 born in 1970. Cohort studies are an unusually powerful means of teasing out causes and effects in sociology and medicine. To take just one example, a comparison of the data across the three cohorts shows that a rise in obesity during the 1980s affected all three at the same time, probably due to changes in ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... Auden himself. Biographers have two options. The first is to choose a strong narrative line, which means travelling light when it comes to what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. The other is to put together a portrait ‘from the life’, which is what Parker has done. This book is not, primarily, about Isherwood’s career, but about ...”

“... days after the birth of their daughter, the future Mary Shelley.Wollstonecraft was described by David Bromwich as ‘the first modern theorist of an idea of individuality’. She strove to effect change not only in the structures of male domination, suggesting, for example, that women should be represented in Parliament, but in the social and psychological ...”

“... Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?’ wrote J.M. Keynes of David Lloyd George in 1919. ‘How can I convey to the reader ... any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character ...”