Search Results

“... One of the strongest and strangest moments in David Lynch’s unsettling TV serial Twin Peaks, part of the dream of wholesome investigating agent Dale Cooper, comes when he is kissed full on the mouth by the figure of Laura Palmer, who was a ‘wild girl’ but is now dead and whose murderer he has come to town to detect ...”

“... twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to his collection, outbidding and outsmarting rivals wherever she went. During the last decades of the 19th century, Morgan had overseen an enormous transfer of wealth from ...”

“... Ann Pasternak Slater’s Shakespeare the Director is the best new book on Shakespeare I have read in the last year, and is prefaced by generous tributes to and from the General Editor of the New Arden Shakespeare. Nonetheless, that edition is unsuited to her critical purposes, and she explains that her ‘sole criterion in each case is to use the text supposedly closest to the author’s manuscript ...”

“... too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick. When he died in 1982, Dick was a cult figure, admired unreservedly in the science fiction subculture, and in the American ...”

“... Paley; Time Inc, including Life, owned by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. Beginning in the Thirties with President Roosevelt, who, more than any President before him, manipulated the newspapers and the new possibilities of ...”

“... buy food for my family’. Nobody left alive remembers how long he spent in prison, but it’s said that he once stole an armoured car just to take it for a joyride. He was wild when he was young. By the time I knew him he was a genial elderly truck driver who liked to retell his mother’s stories of growing up in a ...”

“... taking horse to go on a journey’. This contemporary description indirectly acknowledges Turpin’s status as a self-defined gentleman (his father was a butcher), for gentlemen took horse, while the poor walked. For weeks, Turpin had been ‘eating, drinking and carousing’, ‘joking, drinking and telling stories’ with an unending stream of visitors to ...”

“... right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of course! Something must ...”

“... might be ‘Where do the thumbs go?’ Hands are notoriously difficult to draw: all those fingers so close together, limblets so expressive when we use them in life, yet often numb and dumb when pictured. I remember the caricaturist Mark Boxer telling me that he felt ill-equipped to draw hands, ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself ...”

“... mode.’ There is no doubt that this is in the right area. Compare, for instance, Darko Suvin’s now famous definition of Science Fiction as ‘a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’...”

“... The 15th-century classic of paranoid witch-hunting, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, provides a convenient gloss on the word ‘glamour’. Witches, the Dominican inquisitors tell us, can rob a man of his penis or at least make him think that he has been robbed. The victim wakes up in the morning, looks down and sees nothing there – or rather he sees, where his penis should be, what is called a ‘glamour ...”

“... and architects, mercenary knights, princess brides. Far from being a leisure activity, travel was so perilous that the Church sent criminals on long-distance pilgrimages as penance, hoping they wouldn’t join the outlaw bands that lay in ambush in lonely mountain passes. The devout, meanwhile, went on pilgrimage in a desperate bid for healing or as a ...”

“... to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and so, almost inevitably, he found himself in mid-1940 working for the BBC, first in the Monitoring Service, later in the Chinese section of the Overseas Service. Haffenden’s huge second volume begins there, and it is clear at ...”

“... pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives grading into Portuguese without shame’ (whose shame is anticipated here by a writer always alert to the ...”