Search Results

“... one, in which the projection of sovereign power and ideology was the driver of overseas expansion? Philip Stern’s commanding history of British corporate imperialism suggests that the question is poorly framed. In an earlier book, he influentially presented the East India Company as a ‘company-state’, a hybrid uniquely successful in making ...”

“... an interesting slip early in A.S. Byatt’s new novel. It is 1895. A young working-class man, Philip Warren, has been adopted by a liberal upper-class family, the Wellwoods. At the Kentish country home of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, a glorious Midsummer Party is in preparation. Humphry is a banker (though he will soon switch to journalism), and Olive is a ...”

“... No one, certainly not a novelist like Philip Oakes, can resist the temptation to rearrange memories, impose some sort of order or pattern. In the same way that a novelist may write about his own life, disguising it as a tale about imaginary people, autobiography may be a sly form of fiction. And it follows that the success of an autobiography depends on whether or not he makes a good story of it ...”

“... Four hundred years ago, on 17 October 1586, Sir Philip Sidney died at the age of 31 of a wound sustained in a skirmish at Zutphen, where his forces had fought for the Dutch cause against Spanish domination of the Netherlands. It was one of the great deaths of English history. His early biographers – or hagiographers – wrought a tale of battlefield heroism and deathbed stoicism that helped the myth of Sidney to become more powerful than the man had ever been ...”

“... The last, by the Canadian George Cassar, appeared as recently as 1977. Before that there was Philip Magnus’s in 1958 and one by General Ballard in 1930, in addition to the three-volume official life published by his former private secretary, Sir George Arthur, in 1920, a host of shorter studies and several investigations into the circumstances of his ...”

“... often taken parodic form (the soup cans of Andy Warhol, the deliberate kitsch of architects like Philip Venturi, author of the feisty manifesto Learning from Las Vegas) is now itself parodied in Gilbert Adair’s funny and accomplished second novel. The narrator of Love and Death on Long Island is the Hampstead-inhabiting author of four novels more popular ...”

“... two coach-loads of tourists drive up. Might their arrival have anything to do with her spreads in Stern, the Sunday Times, the National Geographic and dozens of other magazines, with her two books about the Nuba or the film she made of them? Little Me hasn’t been able to resist boasting of the circulation of her magazine pieces, or of the bookshop windows ...”

“... insight’ about himself: ‘that all the while he was acting like he wasn’t, he was a man of stern morality.’ I wonder if early in adult life Bern didn’t have an insight no less terrifying about himself, maybe more terrifying – that he was a man of stern morality who could act only like what he was. Between our ...”

“... man, so that his sins simply fall away from him, to be replaced by present joy and future hope.’ Philip Toynbee introduces Part of a Journey with a Which-type survey of the various concepts, and consequent terminology, of religious conversion, at one point making it sound like the best china (‘ “Rebirth” should be kept for very special ...”

“... shorter even than I.’ In his recent critical collection, The Position of the Body, Richard Stern observes that his home town, Chicago, used to represent authenticity for American literature: ‘With Chicago, the word “real” comes to mind. Farce amid grimness. Fires and fists, strikes, riots, clubs and cops, machine tools and machine ...”

“... and mysteries, cruelties and colourful characters, and occasional flashes of enlightenment, as Philip Hoare’s book reminds us. Chief among the enigmas are other people. Until that moment, I’d thought the whale unfathomable. A half-fabled creature, emerging from the deep in a holiday resort. But that woman was now the greater puzzle. What was going on ...”

“... 1979) are at an all-time high, helped by the timely publication of her letters; while shares in Philip Larkin (d. 1985) are at an all-time low, helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess ...”

“... forgiveness.’ The seductive irreverence of this book accompanies an unwavering allegiance to a stern moral framework. Sin and suffering cannot be evaded in a fallen world: but goodness can assume odd disguises, and the worst among us can still hope for grace. There is nothing new in what Alice Thomas Ellis has to tell us. But then, innovation has never ...”

“... as donor and beneficiary. At its most ambitious, the revival of group selection delivers a stern rebuke to the traditional supposition that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are rigorous replacements for the sloppiness of group selection. Rather, these fashionable models are disguised variants of the fundamental group selectionist idea. The models ...”

“... do so. The interior of the house was enchanting down even to the shape of the seat-backs. But the stern sounds of Philip II’s monologue from Verdi’s Don Carlos brought back the reality of the situation. ‘She has never loved me,’ Philip sings of his wife Elisabeth de Valois. So ...”