Search Results

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”

“... but a disposition’. But all these distinguished people, it now appears, were mistaken. E.H.H. Green, who is a don at Magdalen College, Oxford, with some highly regarded books to his credit and who is not the first academic to take such a position, tells us in Ideologies of Conservatism that the ‘conception of Conservatism as a form of “non ...”

“... an elegant and graceful form; which, it must be said, Robin did not have. But he had interesting green eyes and a fair complexion.’ She is, in fact, a mistress of diminishment, skilled in the art of damning with faint praise. She worried about the way her ‘rather colourful love-life contrasted with his … he had had so little opportunity to sow his wild ...”

“... at your door, papier-mâché heads, a cloud no bigger than ... It might have been blue satin, Peter Stuyvesant Gold, Deep Heat, umbrella pines, familiar two-note calls repeated at intervals, a lifeguard’s upraised hand. It didn’t matter what it was, almost anything would do to bring it all back to you, then take it away again. Till Soon How I laughed ...”

“... In the first chapter of Peter Redgrove’s novel we are introduced to a poet named Guy, who is about to read aloud some poems he has written about bees. He breaks off a meandering introduction to tell his audience: I can see you saying, ‘Why doesn’t he keep to the point?’ But not keeping to it, is the point ...”

“... the guests and producing a sense of guilt. It could be a compressed version of an unwritten Henry Green novel. The centrepiece of Maxwell’s collection is the long title poem, a sustained and inventive achievement. ‘Out of the Rain’ partakes of biblical tale, medieval allegory, surrealist comedy. It tells the story of a flood – the Flood – which ...”

“... could be turned in his clay to the bung in a wine barrel. It is a trope that recurs repeatedly in Peter Redgrove’s recent work, You take turns to be food, Before you can grind wheat you have to be wheat, Before you can eat bread you are a nice new crust Eaten by Mary, who chooses a crust-you here, A mouthful of Shakespeare’s breath there, a glass Of ...”

“... Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country with prayers and blessings. Women can go anywhere in safety, because there is no ‘incubus’ left lurking in the bushes except for ...”

“... at Mrs Cook’s piece, and was arrested by the following passage: ‘Yet the Police told Rob Green, Miss Murrell’s nephew, that his aunt’s body was found much later, and then that it was found at 7 a.m. Rob Green took voluntary redundancy from the Navy a short time ago, having been a high-ranking Naval Intelligence ...”

“... has the right to do it, because he pays them.’) Kiselev would wear orange trousers and bright green socks to work. His shows warned that paedophiles were taking over the EU; that it’s normal in Sweden for nine-year-olds to have sex but by 12 they are impotent. Alexey began to have trouble sleeping. He drank more. The people who worked for him wanted to ...”

“... until recently, in French translation.*She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills … scooping up handfuls of the green money and dropping it on top of her head so that it came sliding down along the cream-coloured hair, slipping down along her shoulders and body. She was making a noise I never ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... When novelists tell us that the world is made of God’s love or the same green cheese as the moon, we expect them to dramatise their perception – to force their philosophy on us as a magician forces a card – so that we can see how it feels to share it, if only for as long as it takes to read the hook. The same expectation holds good when a novelist proposes, as Gordon Burn does in his new novel Fullalove, that not green cheese or God’s love but black pus – meaningless suffering, and an appetite for meaningless suffering – is the basic building-block of the universe ...”

“... black anklelength crombies no burden: the perfect day for a funeral. Walking down towards Bethnal Green, through Haggerston Park and over Hackney Road, I appreciate the unnatural, expectant stillness – dispersed by the fretting of traffic that is already beginning to snag up. Outsiders, transients, put it down to road works; an extension of the tarmac hole ...”