Search Results

“... of the Senderista cult. One might have expected Shakespeare to draw on the examples of Conrad, Greene or Paul Theroux for his fantasia on violence and evil at the headwaters of the Amazonian jungle. Instead he borrows the fluid, elliptic techniques of Latin Americans such as Fuentes, Marquez and – above all – Llosa. The Vision of Elena Silves seems in ...”

“... cropping up in a Western. ‘He has a lot in common with Ronald Reagan,’ commented Graham Greene, who had been a close friend of Paul VI but, significantly, never received an overture from John Paul: ‘They are both world leaders who were in fact just actors.’ Greene had a dream in which he opened a newspaper to ...”

“... this Panamanian version of the socialism of fools: Torrijos was going to play clever, bold Jack-in-the-beanstalk while Uncle Sam grimaced and growled, ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum!’ and get all kinds of political benefit from the masquerade – in Panama, in Europe, in the Third World and (pricelessly) among liberals in the United States.   But who had ...”

“... a definite commodity … I’ve had oil-painting shows that were very realistic, then I’ve done jack-off collages, cut-outs one year and drawings … it’s all been different … People want to buy a Warhol or a person instead of a work. My work’s never become ‘a Brainard’. Or even a Jainard or a Bernard or a Joe. Here are the last six ‘I ...”

“... her mistress. But when she smelt those suitcases with the familiar scents, little Mini, the Jack Russell bitch, nearly went mad with joy and had almost forcibly to be removed from the room.’ Hailsham the private man, son, husband, even father of the egregious Douglas, is very lovable, so much so that the Hogg of the two ...”

“... extraordinary incident in which Clark moved heaven and earth to prevent an unfavourable review by Jack McManners (a friend) of the first volume of the History of Australia from being published. In the end he couldn’t stop publication but did bully McManners into writing a letter to the same journal effectively apologising for what he had written (though ...”

“... was so small it couldn’t be measured. Same with dance music in the heyday of the dance bands: Jack Payne, Henry Hall and Ambrose were all tuneful and popular; the more rarified Fred Elizalde at the Savoy was so disliked that he had to be dropped from the rota. And for the first time, as far as I know, a history of pre-war radio pays serious attention to ...”

“... reminiscent of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film of The Entertainer as well as early Graham Greene. The style is distinctive in the way it wanders in and out of interiority, with private thought and public speech undifferentiated by punctuation or mise-en-page. The central character, the focalising consciousness of the novel, is the eponymous young ...”

“... again included, were convinced that no such window would be allowed to stay open for long. Graham Greene made a visit to Chile in the early Allende years and spent a good deal of time with the supporters of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), who kept on warning that there would be a violent confrontation, engineered by the ruling class and the ...”

“... I was given it in the 1990s and it’s one of my treasures. In it, Maud discusses (with Frank Greene, her relative, who was also a relative of the future novelist Graham Greene) the possible meaning of RLS’s story ‘Will o’ the Mill’. The speaker in the story looks out too, on a whole life, over the broad plain ...”

“... ran: We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s ...”

“... and the String, or Twangdang-dillo-dee. In which you shall jig upon the scaffold, at the end of Jack Ketch’s rope.’ This vigorous language frightens the actor into telling what he knows – which is not much, for he has himself been deceived. He knew the whore Fanny only in her guise as the respectable maidservant, Louise, but he is better informed ...”

“... bulks large in Sidney’s Arcadia; through Sidney he provides the sub-plot of King Lear, through Greene the plot of Winter’s Tale, Orsino alludes to him, Hamlet quotes him. In France, at least, the fashion lasted. The young Racine, at Port Royal, learned Heliodorus by heart; Mlle de Scudéry outprosed her model in Le Grand Cyrus, the pap of a whole ...”

“... clear, too, that he learned incessantly from his fellows in the theatre such as Kyd and Lyly and Greene and Peele and Nashe, who were not incapable of objecting to his assimilative invasion. Shakespeare was, like Chaucer, a ‘great translator’, which meant he was capable of creative response, in terms of adaptation and mimicry. But he gave back ...”

“... Although this was acclaimed as a British triumph and Tenzing held up an ice-axe flying the Union Jack for the summit photograph, Hillary is in fact a New Zealander, and Tenzing, who died in 1988 loaded with British honours, was a Nepalese. Most of the expedition’s other climbers were British, as was its finance, and its leader, Colonel John Hunt (now Baron ...”