Search Results

“... sexual and racial ambiguity. With great novelistic skill, bringing together detail and movement, Carroll evokes, through the reminiscences of his narrator, his own version of the surreal everydayness of American life. In the Crowds and Power restaurant, people of various races tell each other jokes. Here, Max courts Lily; he makes friends with Lincoln and ...”

“... Starting from such a standpoint can lead to an unduly socialist reading of certain classics. For Carroll’s Alice, Leeson tells us, ‘the worst thing that can happen is that she should wake up and find herself living in a poor child’s home.’ Really, of course, Alice is simply afraid of finding herself not herself, but someone quite ...”

“... Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able to remember what it had been about. Mellers has, at the very least, used his ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... other politicians were ‘bad behaviour risks’, which was perhaps what stirred Congressman B. Carroll Reece to attack the Rockefeller Foundation for funding Kinsey’s ‘Communist-inspired’ efforts at ‘weakening American morality’. (The foundation withdrew its generous funding and gave the money to a theological seminary instead.) In July 2003, in ...”

“... reaching us effectively pre-satirised, it’s worth looking at the 2003 media coverage of Michael Carroll, a lotto lout who seems to have chosen the role of John the Baptist to Amis’s rough beast of incarnate chavhood. Carroll, twenty, banned from driving, turned the grounds of his Norfolk villa into a 24-hour race track ...”

“... remembering’, ‘a conflation of the period recalled with the process of recalling it’. Jonathan Lethem, in his very sharp introduction to a Modern Library reprint of The Man Who Was Thursday, says the novel is ‘far too personal and strange to parse as an allegory of Chesterton’s Catholicism’, and he is right. Or rather, it is too personal and ...”

“... bulwarks against the neo-liberal attack. The appointment of the former Shell executive Philip Carroll to run the Baghdad energy ministry was logical, given Paul Bremer’s belief that the Iraqi Governing Council’s attachment to oil nationalisation ‘had to be changed’. Bremer’s first act as proconsul, after all, had been directed at the 190 ...”

“... the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said. The most blatant ...”