Search Results

“... in one respect, though: something is happening in recent British and Irish poetry. Poets like Paul Durcan, Ian McMillan and Peter Didsbury (all well represented here) are pushing the form towards performance and gaudy narrative. Many of the poets are writing long, stringy lines reminiscent of the American poet C.K. Williams, or having cartoonish fun with ...”

“... Brixton bus garage was besieged by reporters and photographers hoping to catch a glimpse of Magnus Mills, perhaps scribbling in the cab of his Routemaster, or discussing Joyce in rhyming slang. We have since been bombarded with features, interviews and increasingly laborious jokes, usually along the lines of Wendy Cope’s poem about men and buses ...”

“... for devising the ERP and ensuring it was carried out: Marshall himself, William Clayton, Paul Hoffman, Richard Bissell and Arthur Vandenberg. All are portrayed as extraordinarily talented, dedicated and selfless individuals who acted out of a classical sense of republican virtue and, like Cincinnatus or George Washington, returned to private life at ...”

“... by a hit-man in Spain in 1990 – in a rather different aura, more Gauloise than Craven A. Piers Paul Read’s The Train Robbers (1978) was another one: ‘the evil ... which I had sought in the train robbers can be found in any one of us and has little to do with the law of the land. There was both a good thief and a bad thief on Calvary and the good thief ...”

“... employed a bevy of refugee leftist intellectuals like Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirkheimer and Paul Baran. Recent books include poignant accounts like Gabrielle Edgcomb’s From Swastika to Jim Crow, about the sixty-odd German Jewish professors who found refuge at black colleges in the American South. According to Claus-Dieter Krohn, a quarter of the ...”

“... and 1970s, have slowly disappeared. They have less often been replaced by representations of John Paul II, perhaps more respected than loved in Italy, than by those of Padre Pio, the charismatic southern Italian Capuchin friar who claimed to have received the stigmata, and who was made a saint, in record time, by John ...”

“... Dictionary the knowledge of some hitherto unsuspected developments in 18th-century robotics. In Paul Micou’s Rotten Times the main character suffers from a hyperactive access of memory, known as Tourraine’s Syndrome, brought on while he was shaving in an aircraft flying through a thunderstorm. Even Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love, by far the most ...”

“... of trauma and unhappiness which Sartre was deprived of. His father died, it is true, before Jean-Paul was aware of him, but even this – he makes clear in Les Mots – was a deeply fortunate occurrence: while every other male child is an Aeneas slogging around with an Anchises on his back, he alone was free – free and filled with loathing at the sight of ...”

“... by Minister Farakhan. Some campuses, like Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, and Macalester, in St Paul, Minnesota, are served by bookstore-cafés, which double as literary salons; others inhabit a wasteland of thrift shops and greasy spoons. Faculty lifestyles and manners vary widely as well. At Queens College, in a polyglot borough of New York, we dined at a ...”

“... mushroom expeditions, the sledge drives by moonlight and the rides to drink milk at the estate saw mills, those who had ears might have heard the clang of hammer and sickle.’ Nor was she hoodwinked or hypnotised, as Mary was, by the apparent security and comforts of middle-class Early Victorian England. She saw, understood and supported what was happening ...”

“... the knotted string from which the artist’s hands struggle to escape is the punitive opposite of Paul Klee’s bouncy, cheerful ‘taking a line for a walk’. In Hand Lead Fulcrum the artist’s arm drops slowly down off the horizontal, neatly allegorising the weight of pigment, while also articulating the physical labour of the drafting hand. The two pairs ...”

“... The success​ of Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers (2009), is the kind of good luck story worth passing on to any dispirited author. When Cold Water Flat, the band he drummed with in the 1990s, broke up after touring the US and Europe, he studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson ...”

“... and reflective, modelled on Negro singing (particularly that of the Music Hall artist Florence Mills), but also close to Delius’s manner and what would be Walton’s in his 1931 Osbert Sitwell oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast; a dancing, hard-hitting orchestral style, somewhat anticipatory of Leonard Bernstein’s; and a marvellously discursive piano part ...”

“... in tandem with steam technologies, horses were used to harvest, thresh and bale hay, and in mills to grind flour; to pull stagecoaches and canal boats over long distances and omnibuses, streetcars and hackney cabs over shorter ones; to move goods to and from factories, farms and markets around the clock. A world without horses must have been as hard to ...”

“... the same, of course, but in this case the dating was pretty precise. It was ten years since John, Paul, George and Ringo had recorded their first session together at the Akustik, a small studio in Hamburg (apparently a single 78 rpm copy of ‘Summertime’ still survives); and Lennon’s declaration that ‘the dream is over’ in ‘God’, track ten on ...”