Search Results

“... by Hollywood (Joanne Harris’s backlist, incidentally, is selling like hot chocolate), help may still be at hand in the form of literary prizes. The Booker, which despite Martin Amis’s best protests still considers itself ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary accolade’ (whatever that means), won’t be bestowed until 17 October, and the shortlist ...”

“... letter to Alice Godley explaining why he had to jilt her on the occasion of his escape, may be seen, as she says, in the National Library of Tasmania at Hobart. Another story, called ‘The Red-Haired Girl’, is about a group of poor and talentless young English painters on an expedition to Brittany in 1882, the girl in question being used as a ...”

“... to her tomorrows,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, the last person to see her alive. But now we may be in a position to say that Marilyn Monroe’s tomorrows have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie star; that’s more books than ...”

“... to be put to the question. Music to John Reid’s ears that would have been. Reid’s ambition may well be to establish himself as New Labour’s most illiberal home secretary yet. Such an aspiration means of course having to out-Blunkett Blunkett, and that is a stiff call. Reid no doubt knew when he spoke in Manchester that his predecessor was on the ...”

“... on a single cliff. Its future will be determined, as the Merlin engine’s was, in battle. It may win the commercial war with Boeing – it doesn’t combine technological overreach with commercial finger-crossing as Concorde did. On the other hand, it just may, like Brunel’s Great Eastern, be too far ahead of the ...”

“... just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a penis-envy which may be sublimated into some vague desire for intellectual achievement but which can only be allayed by bearing a child, preferably male, as phallus? If H.D. dreamt of a princess stepping down towards water, to find and protect a baby, while she stood by as ...”

“... beginning to wonder whether the high-tech, jargoned, reader-alienating image of the modern product may not have some disadvantages. Of course it can be argued that there can be no going back, the old criticism having been declared intellectually deluded, dishonest and collusive with political authoritarianism. ‘With the advent of Post-Structuralism and the ...”

“... the elegant public festivals and balls with which costumed Florentines welcomed the first day of May, celebrated princely marriages, and forwarded requests for dates (when these were made by gentlemen of standing to ladies of high position, the government cleared the streets to let the floats, pages, and ever-burning hearts go by on their way to the lady’s ...”

“... critic says he does, and indeed that’s part of the transaction. While the critic’s response may not be fully our own, it is an ideal proxy, a model for what our response might be. Of course Winckelmann’s tone, his language of sensibility, is not what we ask from art critics now (though it is sometimes what we get). But that voice of witness still ...”

“... recognise as one of the ... distinctive characteristics of their own kingdom’. Such chauvinism may say as much about the anxious cultural politics of contemporary France as it does about the history of Poussin scholarship, and yet the underlying concern is not without foundation. The villain of the piece (now typecast by his starring role in other ...”

“... The term is one that she took from the natural sciences, and when she adopted it she may have been thinking of Proust, who had recently made such apt and witty use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de Charlus and his newest heart-throb, Jupien. In biology, a ...”

“... clueless, can we review our contemporary options and their histories with some sense of relief. We may have very real doubts now about, say, aromatherapy, or ECT, or cognitive psychology – or even about people having personal trainers – but we quite literally have to do something when we begin to feel in some way troubled. It is fortunate that pain has ...”

“... sums up what happens to plays, like Shakespeare’s, that outlast their own time – and what may now be happening to his own: What keeps the classical plays alive is the use made of them, even if it’s misuse. In the schoolroom morals are squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains ...”

“... proclaim ‘Power to the people’ in making usage the only criterion of whether something may be said, there is then for them an immediate opening-up of rich new possibilities of authority and authoritarianism. For who is to tell the people how the people are (is?) using their (its?) immense language except the indispensable new class of panoptic ...”

“... men performing public roles. An artist who found his work in the king’s collection, though he may have seen it lost from public view, was not in the pay of a private individual. As Cowen points out, the great era of private patronage is the present day, when unheard-of numbers of private individuals are able to contribute something to artistic ...”