Search Results

“... in Ireland as everywhere else, and not just in the Ascendancy circles in which Beckett grew up. Elizabeth Bowen records that when her house was temporarily taken over in 1922 by the young soldiers of the IRA they avidly seized from the shelves the thin scarlet Kipling volumes and seemed to find themselves and their aspirations given substance and colour in ...”

“... of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A ...”

“... of David Jones and Eric Ravilious, and John Minton’s decorations for the cookery books of Elizabeth David. Only in the coolest hardware shops or the deepest Habitat basements can one believe that the purpose of kitchen design is functional. In the history of taste, painting is only occasionally important: originality of a profound sort very rarely ...”

“... past. Maybe, in all that rushing and tumbling, he came across a filling station like the one in Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, a place where the rows of cans are arranged so that they softly say: Esso-so-so-so to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all. He had found his West at last. Our white caravan took us in the end to Texas, but before that ...”

“... the rude irruption of European adventurers into the New World. In the royal charter that Queen Elizabeth conferred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, she granted him full power over the soil of ‘those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida … to dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or ...”

“... There is more vim and traction in later missives to the Scottish poets Robert Crawford and Rab Wilson, written in the six-line, tightly rhymed stanzas known as standard Habbie. ‘Surprising by their fine excesses,’ he says of Burns, in another echo of Keats’s letters, ‘Like bottled stuff that effervesces,/The lines fly past like fast ...”

“... more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she ...”

“... have English as a second language, but the names they suggest for the story are always similar: Elizabeth, Henry, Jack. You can only be a hero, we have told children, if you have that kind of name: names licked clean by kings and queens. One of the highest compliments in Kipling’s writing is: ‘You’re a white man.’ That is changing now, albeit ...”

“... poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at Harvard). Their work has stood up ...”

“... need to remember that his time coincided roughly with that of American candidates such as Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, and special allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and ...”

“... showed a good deal more confidence, and their work transcends mere period interest. In Angus Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After (1952), fellow gay writers and readers found their world described with a liberating candour and naturalness new to British literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer ...”

“... over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s 80th birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with everyone Jocelyn has known or worked ...”

“... between judicious sips of bottled water. Friends of the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Edmund Wilson would describe in his journals as the queen bee of the Martha’s Vineyard ‘cocktail belt’, Styron and Rose would become champion party-throwers themselves up in Roxbury, Connecticut, between work-slogs. But by the year of Kazin’s Christmas ...”

“... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too ...”

“... as a critic. Agee was not interested in teaching his audience, as Shaw and Mencken and Edmund Wilson were interested, and as his colleagues at the Nation Clement Greenberg and B.H. Haggin were. He does not drive home an argument and avoids underlining the implications of a perception. Rather, he will broadly sketch a chosen compliment, travesty, explosive ...”