Search Results

“... dump in which (it is implied) mere heterosexuals are content to fret and rot from crib to coffin. Stephen Adams does not propose a general or ‘encompassing’ thesis. Having insisted that methods and messages are diverse and individual, he settles down to record them, beginning with Gore Vidal and ending with Jean Genet. His manner is to give detailed and ...”

“... combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil al-Araby district. I’m not sure if we drove to Green 5 – the streets were getting quieter.’ The patrol was about forty kilometres from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled along a dimly lit ...”

“... climbing Somali ‘attrition rate’ has been alarming in the light of anecdotal evidence about young grunts hoping to notch a ‘kill’. Official sources have usually linked the casualties to real or feared assaults on United States positions or personnel. Such was the justification for a strike led by attack helicopters on an arms dump in Mogadishu which ...”

“... a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list; North American paperback ...”

“... for worse! How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young alas and take heart. Or better worse say still a watch of night alas to come. A rest of last watch to come. And take heart. It would be a great pity if, nowadays, Beckett had become more celebrated than read, or if the classic status of the early work had ...”

“... middle of a concert. The heroine of her first novel The Comforters is a quite plausibly tiresome young woman, using her recent conversion to Catholicism as a means of tantalising her former lover. But her conviction that she is being written into a novel and that her life is dictated by this falls heavily between an unlikely neurosis and a mere authorial ...”

“... William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, who rose from relative obscurity to become regent for the young Henry III and one of the most powerful men in Europe. Marshal’s craftsmen used fast-grown trees for the door’s outer face and a powerful lattice of slow-grown timber for the reinforcement inside: no expense spared, no older wood reused, nothing but the ...”

“... it. The rationale of the decision was that the historic purpose of the University was to educate young men, and that the University itself could not by a simple rule-change make it otherwise. It is remarkable that Jex-Blake and the others came within two judicial votes of victory, but it was Parliament which then took up the running, both responding to and ...”

“... is of course 1938. But Mr Tilos is so thin a character that he seems more like a refugee from The Young Visiters, or Toytown, than Budapest. The grown-up writer has to be faux-naive, and in Pym’s prewar work the simplicity doesn’t always have the necessary knowingness behind it – as it does, for instance, in Stevie Smith, whom Barbara Pym ...”

“... throughout his subject’s life and work. The published version concerns a writer persuaded by his young bride on their Riviera honeymoon, first to exchange gender roles, then to take another woman as his lover. In turn alarmed and bored by the experiment, increasingly resentful of the time her husband spends on the other woman and his work, the wife burns the ...”

“... more at home. ‘It is our gift,’ he said, ‘to have visions, and I want to share that of a young boy who wrote to me shortly after I took office.’ Over the years he has launched into hundreds of these anecdotes: the country, it seems, is filled with juvenile letter-writers, refugees from the Evil Empire, freedom-loving victims of the wicked ...”

“... associate with Sydney Kentridge and they are likely to say the Steve Biko inquest. Biko was the young leader of the Black Consciousness movement who in 1977 was tortured and beaten to death over a period of days by members of the South African security police who then, with the connivance of police doctors, lied their way through the inquest conducted by ...”

“... coupling in Ulysses when he paired the Jewish commercial traveller Leopold Bloom with the young artist Stephen Dedalus, whose namesake is the Cretan master who designed that Iliad dancefloor.) Critics have often noted the Odyssey’s almost obsessive attention to luxury artefacts and crafted objects – a metapoetic ...”

“... simply be the result of sexual maladjustment?’ This question, unobtrusively formulated in Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism (1937), lurks as a sub-text in some of the most significant writings of his generation. For authors like Auden, Isherwood and Spender, the struggle for sexual freedom was a stimulus to political dissent. Around ...”

“... to be politicians as poets, or indeed judges or bishops, lords or commoners, men of influence or young unknowns; and any single individual might fulfil more than one of these roles. Arnold’s social experience was certainly not confined to the society of other intellectuals, still less of other ‘educationists’: one of the works of reference most ...”