Search Results

“... In Nabokov’s witty and disarming ‘Ballad of Longwood Glen’, published in the New Yorker in 1957, shy, dreamy Art Longwood climbs a tree on a family picnic to retrieve his son’s ball – and carries on climbing: Up and up Art Longwood swarmed and shinned, And the leaves said yes to the questioning wind. What tiaras of gardens! What torrents of light! How accessible ether! How easy flight! His family circled the tree all day ...”

“... Ismail Kadare knew what was coming six years ago. ‘The Albanians have kept extremely calm in Kosovo,’ he told me, ‘because they know that the Serbs are only waiting for a sign of provocation to start a terrible massacre. Milosevic is biding his time. All his plans are ready. He is encouraged by the passivity of the European nations and the US ...”

“... success and written so convincingly about them should have fallen into the trap set by life’. In Julian Evans’s depiction of the Havana scene in Semi-Invisible Man, we begin to understand the force of Hemingway’s decline and its effect on Lewis’s own persona as an author for whom the boundaries of self and world were already beginning to ...”

“... Against the ruins of love and idealism, Alice Thomas Ellis shores up the fragmentary consolations of art. Her books are beautifully fashioned, tailored, cut from superior cloth: you’re aware of the chunks from the fabric of experience that she has rejected, and her characters know just enough of the outside world not to be able to make sense of themselves ...”

“... I am not​ a dictator,’ the hero of Yasmina Khadra’s latest novel assures himself as his end approaches. ‘I am the uncompromising sentinel, the she-wolf protecting her little ones … the untameable jealous tiger that urinates on international conventions to mark his territory.’ Not long afterwards we find him stumbling through a field as his jubilant enemies close in ...”

“... of tomorrow’ on the ruins of bombed-out towns and cities in the United Kingdom. The Blitz, as Julian Huxley remarked, was ‘a planner’s windfall’. In their plans for London, Ernö Goldfinger and E.J. Carter said their aim was to give the capital ‘order and efficiency and beauty and spaciousness’. This would inevitably require further ...”

“... devised his own handsomely workmanlike ‘Constructions’. In 1935 Piper’s girlfriend Myfanwy Evans launched Axis, a review of ‘“Abstract” Painting and Sculpture’ that brought their English contemporaries – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ivon Hitchens – into a common fold with Kandinsky, Miró, Calder and Arp, all then working in Paris. At ...”

“... Nashville and Short Cuts would bother. The writer credited with Gosford Park was the now ennobled Julian Fellowes, who strongly disputes a claim made by the film director Monte Hellman that ‘the whole script was rewritten on set and not one of his lines of dialogue remained in the movie.’ Ten years later, the storyline and script for Gosford Park, minus ...”

“... Institute for Psychical Research, arrives after his sidekick, the ‘personable’ Laurie Evans, who wants to work in the movies, has confirmed his own sightings. Another reporter – this time from the Croydon Advertiser – stays overnight; he is playing darts downstairs when a heavy wardrobe lands on top of the empty bed in his room. Dr Gerald ...”

“... something that fits in with Maccoby’s argument. Even the scholarly popularisers are neglected. Julian Morgenstern is only mentioned in passing and Raphael Patai is not mentioned at all; nor is Louis Ginzberg’s seven-volume The Legends of the Jews, which is, by general consent, the major classic in its field. Maccoby, who is librarian of a Jewish college ...”

“... Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank ...”

“... film – which, rather mysteriously, refers in the titles to ‘an original screenplay by Julian Mitchell from Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann’ – shows a phalanx of unpainted male prostitutes, leaning on some railings. Watching for a cab, Stephen Fry’s Wilde makes eye contact with one of them. ‘Looking for someone?’ asks the lad (identified ...”

“... I read her immediately after the war, and I remember Anthony Powell said: ‘Oh you must meet Julian Maclaren-Ross, because he knows all about Jean Rhys.’ He asked me for a drink to meet him, and Maclaren-Ross said she’d died the other day in a sanatorium. So I really did think she was dead, and in my articles would often mention her as ‘the late ...”

“... defendants pleaded not guilty. Six men and six women then took their place in the jury box, and Mr Julian Bevan QC stood up to open for the Crown. According to lawyers and journalists who have observed him at work, Bevan is a ‘pleasant, mild sort of man’, ‘jolly in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way’, ‘nice, but lacking the instinct for the jugular ...”

“... trusted by either. Reflecting on the Guardian’s mutually beneficial but uneasy relationship with Julian Assange during the WikiLeaks affair, Rusbridger writes: I once remarked to a senior intelligence figure that the British and American governments, instead of condemning our role, should go down on their knees in thanks that we were there as a careful ...”