Search Results

“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”

“... helmets, and on and on), the dismissive spelling ‘elf n safety’ used by journalists such as Richard Littlejohn to suggest that it’s an infantilising regime run by ignorant jobsworths obscures the fact that since 1975 there has been a reduction of four-fifths in workplace deaths and of well over two-thirds in reported workplace injuries. As SB ...”

“... was particularly unimpressed by an unnaturally informative cloth label pasted to the back, which read: ‘Shakspere/Born April 23 = 1564/Died April 23 – 1616/Aged 52/This Likeness taken 1603/Age at that time 39 ys.’ Spielmann doesn’t say so, but it’s hard not to suspect that this label was written to overcompensate for that missing two-inch ...”

“... does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and morality, Judge Richard Posner, a leader of the law and economics movement and a professor of law at Chicago. Intellectually as omnivorous as Nussbaum, as prolific and as well read, Posner came to her lectures and wrote out engaging ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... was very nervous about its reception; hence the year-long delay in staging it. Anyone who had read the poem (Nijinsky apparently never did) or who knew the gist and had heard Debussy’s astonishing score might well have imagined a ballet of soft flowing languorous movements and fleeting hazy images. But Nijinsky seems rather to have found inspiration in ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... demands on parliamentary time if such a compulsion still operated). In Rudd’s, if she hadn’t read the figures, she ought to have. But they all had to go. Now ministers stick like barnacles to their ministerial posts, with Johnson’s encouragement. Under previous PMs, the home secretary, Priti Patel, would have had to go for being officially found guilty ...”

“... whose swords are symbolic of pens, printing presses, pamphlets. It is perhaps difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer ...”

“... is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men, some gay (like Rock Hudson), others heterosexual (like Farrell). Sometimes, Farrell took her to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had been ...”

“... itself. As Primo Levi wrote, ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again.’Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places. Parties and policy platforms, or the personalities of ...”

“... by Charmian and her pliant doctors. Stone’s Sailor on Horseback remains both readable and widely read. But as a biography it is flawed. There is not a shred of annotation attached to the text. Stone cannibalised whole chunks of Martin Eden (London’s ‘artistic memoirs’) and John Barleycorn (his ‘alcoholic memoirs’) as biographical narrative without ...”

“... visual arts, to such an extent that of Nero’s last words, ‘What an artist dies in me,’ we read that he ‘could fairly describe himself as “artifex” because he practised painting and sculpture’, whereas in fact it certainly referred – whether or not Nero actually said it – to his notorious public perfomances as a musician. Literature, even ...”

“... of blarney in this passionately articulate novel, which takes certain surreal premises as read in order to conduct its mythic discussion of Irish histories. To grant these premises for the duration of a reading is in this case, as it is not in much ‘playful’ fiction, to be carried with great momentum into an unfamiliar but internally consistent ...”