Search Results

“... J’ai horreur de la foule, admitted Hippolyte Taine, author of the vastly influential and vastly hostile history of the French Revolution which appeared in stages during the 1870s and 1880s. Whether we translate foule as ‘crowd’ or ‘mob’ here, English moves the noun from the feminine to the neuter, losing in the process one significant element of the loathing to which Taine confessed ...”

“... and psychologists have increasingly turned their attention. As a psychoanalyst and a historian, Daniel Pick is unusually well-qualified to have written this often intriguing book. The intricate complicity between symptoms and cures – and between what people are considered to be suffering from and what they claim to be suffering from – has made the ...”

“... expressed particularly strongly, and some times and places truly worse to live in than others. Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration shows how the general theme of human ‘degeneracy’ assumed particular prominence in European scientific, social and literary thought during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Paul Weindling’s Health, Race ...”

“... of steps you have to climb to see anyone at all.’ Although it doesn’t mention Leopardi, Daniel Pick’s book is very much about such visits, the dreams Rome inspires and so often disappoints, the city’s place in Italy’s and indeed Europe’s collective psychology. Defeatist by vocation, Leopardi was not the man to do anything about the gap ...”

“... Writers do not always know what their best writings are. Daniel Defoe believed his magnum opus to be his huge, passionately political, intermittently philosophical poem in heroic couplets, Jure Divino (1706). Begun while he was imprisoned in Newgate, its 12 books assailed the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs from every angle he could imagine ...”

“... and would rather ‘interrogate connections’ than make causal claims. They have learned, as Daniel Pick writes, that ‘the relationship of economic conditions to cultural production, social action and literary form’ cannot ‘be assumed in advance’. Such connections must rather ‘be researched, case by case’. All this caution makes for a ...”

“... and ‘give it a shake’ in case it gets cancelled entirely. If the phone rings, I’ll pick it up on the first chirp – why wait for the second or the third? The desire to impress in this way is depressing. Now is the time to look out my window in case I miss the sparrow. II I talk on the phone to Julie, who wants to meet me tomorrow at ...”

“... was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling argument that God ...”

“... make a living. F tells me to drive to a park on a nearby hillside and stop the car. We get out and pick our way through a patch of scrub until we reach a large rock that juts out from the hillside. At the base of the rock, in a natural cave, are mattresses, discarded clothes and a cooking pot. A half-eaten meal is still inside the pot. The inhabitants are out ...”

“... circumstances, and the right hand respects that – so long as the left hand does in the end pick up the pieces. And it will. Downing Street’s first-choice strategy for the outing of David Kelly – writing, semi-publicly, to the Intelligence and Security Committee to offer him as a witness – was vetoed by Ann Taylor MP, the Committee’s ...”

“... for 16 August; no, 22 August; no, the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Back then, you could take your pick. But there was no question about the consequences. Flights were cancelled, carry-on allowances restricted and liquids banned; British Airways claimed they had lost £100 million in revenue; Ryanair threatened to sue the government over the security measures ...”

“... Daniel​ Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the writers and directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once, were worried, apparently, that Covid-related delays might result in their film arriving late for a party at which everyone was already talking about plural possible worlds. Recently it has felt almost impossible to go to the movies without having to engage with some multiverse or other, inhabited by Spider-Man, the Avengers or the Justice League ...”

“... to shore against her et cetera, even if neither of them knows what the words mean. The reader will pick them up, though Symmons Roberts takes care not to make too much rest on them in case the joke is missed. In a better world, all these patchwork pieces would be enough to make a book. But Symmons Roberts wants an audience, so there’s also a thriller-like ...”

“... George, a girl, appalled at her unstylish mother and the new baby, locks herself into her room to pick apart As You Like It for homework while writing decreasingly sensible drafts of a letter to the boy she admires, extravagantly using the Basildon Bond and stamping the envelopes, flouncing backwards and forwards to the mirror and into a luxurious bath that ...”

“... it has diverted attention from the literary excellence of the letters in which it was revealed. As Daniel Karlin justly says in his introduction to this selection, ‘the letters themselves are more interesting than the tabloid version which has predominated from the first outbreak of gossip and which was fixed in the lurid colours of Rudolf Besier’s The ...”