Search Results

“... of there, there, between Nameless, Tennessee and Liberty Bond, Washington – two stations on Moon’s orbit of his own land. As for novelty worship, planned obsolescence – though not necessarily more objectionable than the unplanned British kind – came in 31 flavours or 57 varieties long before the phrase was invented. The celebration of obsolescence ...”

“... unless they’re confident of their survival skills.’ It doesn’t seem to me all that lonely, least not these days, but it’s quiet enough. ‘I think I need to hold off a bit before we listen to the C major,’ the Maestro says, at the end of Bach’s D minor Partita for solo violin, recorded by Nathan Milstein in the mid-1950s. ‘And that’s with one ...”

“... In​ Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon, taken with a camera strapped to his chest, Aldrin stands at ease, his right arm hanging loosely at his side, the left raised as if he’s about to do something – look at his watch, perhaps? The photograph was taken fifty years ago, on 20 July 1969, and it’s one of the most recognisable photographs from the Apollo missions, among the most famous photographs ever taken ...”

“... looking, and this time we expect to find it.In 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts, returning from the Moon, were freed from their capsule by men in masks and immediately clapped in quarantine, in case they introduced some dreadful alien infection to the planet. Even at the time, Nasa knew there was nothing much to fear. The ...”

“... were no lions anymore. There had been lions once. Sometimes, in the shimmer of the heat on the plains the motion of their running still flickered on the dry wind – tawny, great, and quietly gone.’ The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and the Lion of Jachin-Boaz (1973) opens with these lines, fit for a fairy tale. But the mysterious doubling of the title ...”

“... logic’ of this brief story we find statues, chilis, serpents, nuns, and of course heat (the hotness of the food and the heat of the Jaguar Sun), while the ‘plan’ is to draw the couple closer together, and bring them to an awareness of ‘the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous ...”

“... Ussher: the quest for an accurate and detailed chronology. Rudwick emphasises the positive, or at least unobstructive, role of religion since Ussher, correcting the received idea that the 19th century in particular saw a great ideological clash between science and religion. The Bible was not a barrier to scientific thought: instead, Rudwick argues, the ...”

“... The decisive influence on this grisly dystopia is surely the grand master of all dystopias, William Burroughs. Jack Kerouac, asked for a quote for the jacket of The Naked Lunch, said it was an endless novel that would drive everybody mad. High praise. Downriver is like that, too. It is mostly about the East End. This reviewer is a South ...”

“... pronouncement: Elizabethan poetry ‘lays its emphasis on beauty and desire, roses and the moon’ – it is a measure of Jones’s anthological skills, his literary judgment, not a nose for the modish, that little in the new book is downright boring, lifeless, or truly outdated. Jones’s Introduction occupies a mere 14 pages, some of them ...”

“... it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the ...”

“... few square miles of city, the other hundreds. The first victims are killed by the sheer force and heat of the blast wave. Its diffraction causes the entire human body to be compressed, resulting in embolisms in the arteries and crushing the lungs and heart. Then there is the thermal pulse, which causes flash burns on exposed skin. A large proportion of the ...”

“... like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was ...”

“... Abbey’, so it would scarcely have been unreasonable for the poets to have had high hopes at least of a succès d’estime; but their declared ambitions did not extend much further than raising some money for their Continental trip. If they had all been looking forward to a new adventure together, however, that soon came to nothing: the poets went their ...”

“... apparent. Pom, too, is fascinated by the East, although he travels further (geographically, at least) than Murray’s characters. Lord William Arthur Valerian Pommeroy is the hippy aristocrat who, in Nobuko Albery’s Absurd Courage, becomes so fascinated by Oriental thought that he founds a kind of guerrilla ...”

“... a mess, not to mention a pain in the neck. Imagine what it’s like for the writer. Or for Marlon.William Mann does not have the field to himself. There are at least a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten ...”