Search Results

“... On balance, we should be grateful to the BBC for finding room on its snooker station, over ten successive Sundays, for what the editor of Opera described as France’s long-delayed revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. The Boulez-Chéreau Ring has also been described, more preposterously, as ‘the Ring of the century’ – an accolade which plainly belongs to the 1951 Wieland Wagner production which inaugurated the ‘New Bayreuth ...”

“... In 1976, V.S. Pritchett remarked that ‘what has always struck me in Irish writing is the sense of Ireland itself, its past or its imagined future, as a presence or invisible character.’ He added that in English short stories ‘the sense of England as an extra character is very rarely felt.’ Allowing Kipling as one obvious exception, Pritchett was too modest to mention what is probably the finest and most ambitious of his own longer stories, ‘When my girl comes home ...”

“... Ann Pasternak Slater’s Shakespeare the Director is the best new book on Shakespeare I have read in the last year, and is prefaced by generous tributes to and from the General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare. Nonetheless, that edition is unsuited to her critical purposes, and she explains that her ‘sole criterion in each case is to use the text supposedly closest to the author’s manuscript ...”

“... New Arden English is a specialised, hybrid language – Elizabethan in some features, modern in others, but essentially unlike any English written in any period. That doesn’t disturb most people, including critics who would never dream of quoting Donne or Jonson from modernised texts: but it does mean that only the naive will suppose that the editorial aim is to give us, as nearly as possible, what Shakespeare wrote ...”

“... of having to adopt a distinctive (and necessarily irrelevant) theoretic approach. Fortunately Graham Bradshaw, a lover of literature rather than criticism, is a robust simplifying writer in the Empsonian tradition, who knows that abstract theoretic discourse has had its day. He has the boldness, moreover, to cut hermeneutic knots by ignoring much ...”

“... of storytelling in which his ideas are worked out and from which his poetry grows. Indeed, as Graham Bradshaw demonstrates in Keith Sagar’s important new collection of essays The Achievement of Ted Hughes, there’s at least one major text in which this process of growth can be intimately observed. By tracing the composition of Cave Birds, that ...”

“... Passion and Tara and Claire) carries before the dedication page a tribute to his editor, Jennie Bradshaw/Erdal, ‘who has worked closely with me for many years and whose contribution has been invaluable’ in the case of the first novel, ‘immense’ in the case of the second. Such an odd sort of acknowledgment to find at the front of a work of ...”

“... speaking at you it’s like preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got nearer ...”