Search Results

“... its dubious imaginative benefits, weakens any intended social point. So it is no surprise that Stuart Hood and Michael Dibdin concern themselves with the present state of society and morality via Science Fiction and a crime story. Both have produced ingenious – indeed, immensely clever – fictions. Hood’s Peter ...”

“... a genuine claim on the reader. Carcanet publish A Storm from Paradise, together with a reissue of Stuart Hood’s Carlino.* Carlino is straight autobiography, recording the author’s experiences with the Italian Resistance during the war. A Storm from Paradise has equally strong but less direct roots in Hood’s ...”

“... The shopkeeper’s name, not at all a common one, is Mr Halcro. A Mr Halcro also features in Stuart Hood’s novel The Upper Hand – in fact, two Mr Halcros, one of them a cat. The first of these, after whom the cat is named, recruits the narrator as a casual Intelligence agent during his university days in the Thirties. John Melville is a ...”

“... close-textured Outlaws and Highwaymen, which began as a thesis on the robber in Tudor and early Stuart times. Outstanding among her early villains is the Folville gang, headed by a rascally rector, who murdered a Leicestershire magnate and robbed one of Edward I’s trailbaston judges, before going on to commit numerous robberies in Lincolnshire. The gang ...”

“... dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert – and engine driver Hunt’ (Hunt turns out to be a subject, not an author, of light verse, from the pseudonymous Conquest limerick beginning ‘A young engine driver called Hunt’), or the meaning of the abbreviations PWR, IWICSLMSK and BHQ ...”

“... sooner than anyone else was that the mixture had stabilised into cliché, and Japanese studios, Stuart Galbraith tells us in The Emperor and the Wolf (2003), his book on Kurosawa and Mifune, were turning out samurai movies as fast as they could go. Time for parody; but not only for parody. The film is full of music, for instance, a loud, witty soundtrack by ...”

“... the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at all costs’. Even Camden ...”

“... in his opening sentences. Turning to page one of Talking It Over and reading that ‘My name is Stuart, and I remember everything,’ one can be pretty sure that Stuart’s problem is going to be that he can’t forget (and sure enough, 250 pages later, Stuart’s ex-wife is forced to ...”

“... more expert at giving Notes. He appears in Hall’s diary instructing him (by telegram) to release Stuart Burge from the National Theatre to work at the Royal Court, to save it (for the nation, I suppose). Hall obeys the Note, and releases the talented director for his salvage work at Chelsea. The Secretary-General of the Arts Council thanks Hall ‘for being ...”

“... instrument and gave the Cardigan trickster Twm Sion Catti, sometimes known as the Welsh Robin Hood, a wider audience. Charlotte Guest edited and translated the Mabinogion, a genuinely medieval Welsh wonder-tale anthology which had been ‘crowded out of the Myvyrian Archaiology by Iolo’s forgeries’. Hutton further discusses a whole series of power ...”

“... and sounded out, while the existing Apostles made up their minds whether they were apt for embryo-hood, remained the same. Once elected, Apostles were obliged to attend the dinners every Saturday evening in term. The obligation to stand in front of the fireplace and discuss what had been said, let alone to read three essays to the group, was felt by many ...”

“... is ‘unlikely to penetrate average Australia’, dominated as it still is by racist mythologies. Stuart Macintyre, discussing the whole project, put it succinctly: ‘It’s not easy to do justice to the underdog in a volume with gold-blocked end-leaves.’The contradictions which cut between the printed substance and its packaging can also be traced, in a ...”

“... bits of furniture but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round, then beat a quick retreat. I drive back over upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely signposted, though ...”

“... in particular, by other people. Some thinkers, such as Hobbes and, some of the time, John Stuart Mill, think that this is the conception of freedom, and that it contains all that one knows or needs to know about its value. But this is to identify the seed and the plant, or the rhythm and the dance; it does not get us very far in answering ...”

“... of copy. He worked in conditions of creative chaos. Visiting him in his lodgings in 1823, Thomas Hood found him ‘quite at home in the midst of a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs – billows of books, tossing, tumbling, surging open’. His friend Matthew Hill recalled De Quincey turning up for ...”