Search Results

“... chairs, shelves and cupboards covered in boldly patterned plastic laminate. At the same time Michael Graves was designing buildings, kettles and chairs that seemed close relatives to things in old cartoon films. Such work defined ‘postmodern’ better than words could. I wouldn’t call Arad that, but his work seemed to signal the end of the age of the ...”

“... Michael Kelly has produced a vivid, responsible account of his own itinerary, as a contributor to New Republic, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, through the Gulf War: from Baghdad to Amman; on to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Saudi Arabia; into Kuwait and back into Iraq, via Basra; thence to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the darker side of his material, either in the abandoned Iraqi torture chambers of Kuwait City or on the road to Basra ...”

“... In the middle of his new book Michael Baxandall wonders whether the ‘complex Newtonian-Lockean sense of how we see’, which he has just expertly expounded, provides any ‘purchase’ on Chardin’s painting, A Lady Taking Tea, to which ‘our primary explanatory duty is due.’ It is bracing to discover that we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation ...”

“... exactly should enter the public catalogue of our lives, and who gets to decide? In​ 2010, Graeme Wood discovered that a former Harvard classmate, Phineas Upham, and his mother, Nancy, had been arrested for hiding $11 million in Swiss bank accounts and sneaking cash back into America. Not without schadenfreude, Wood set up ...”

“... were threaded. I remember the sensation of sandpaper, the heat of it after it was rubbed on wood and its roughness when I held it to my face.When he finished the model, my father took it to Rabbies, a restaurant he co-owned on Burns Statue Square in Ayr, which served steak with tomatoes cut into Little Red Riding Hood baskets. A copy of the Selkirk ...”

“... When I think ideally of ‘the novel’, this is the one I recur to. One of the many pleasures of Michael Gorra’s book is that he too has loved this novel since he studied it in college, and wants to share his passion for it. He has also taught it for many years, at Smith College, and he has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted ...”

“... peasants.’) Sendero’s pedagogical origins made a difference too: as the American journalist Michael Smith argued in 1992, Sendero was able to spread ‘almost anywhere’ there was ‘a blackboard and benches’. In some ways, Sendero’s doctrinal inflexibility and its distance – physical and ideological – from the rest of the Peruvian left were ...”

“... which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness for Prynne over Larkin is less offensive than his reasons for dismissing Larkin, which betray a shallow ear. Larkin is ...”

“... The Stroke of Fire’, is the biography of a potter’s kiln in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon: a wood-burning Anagama kiln of Korean and Japanese design, in which firings can last as long as a month. Lopez’s research is characteristically thorough. He has investigated the history of the kiln and the physics of each firing. He has read Jack Troy’s ...”

“... sister, Lizzie, is alleged to have said. But that is rather the point, and A House in St John’s Wood is one of the best books I’ve read about not knowing your parents. What if you were just another of their haphazard decisions, subject to regret and contradiction? The drama of Stephen Spender is not that he was sometimes gay – there’s no news there ...”

“... of a perpetual motion machine, working independently of electricity, oil, water or coal, made of wood by an Albanian shepherd. Describing Herbert’s marriage to Mary Vesey, at which the bride had the support of 14 adult bridesmaids, all daughters of peers, she resists any temptation to say that it must have been funny as well as vulgar. It seems we could ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime Minister, about discrepancies in Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... would be broken. The present strike was sparked off by the announcement early in March that Corton-wood – a colliery to which miners had recently been transferred from elsewhere, with a promise that the pit had several years life ahead of it – was now destined for closure within a few months. There is a theory that this provocation was deliberately ...”

“... Mountjoy had consulted in 1597 (when she thought herself pregnant by a neighbouring mercer, Henry Wood), and of George Wilkins, the violent brothel-keeper-turned-author with whom Shakespeare cowrote his most innocent play, Pericles, and with whom the hapless Mary Belott née Mountjoy lodged for a while after her marriage. A.L. Rowse wrote about Forman in the ...”

“... Pass. He used both of them, but not at the same time. A few hundred yards short of the Abbey Wood terminal, where nobody wanted to go, the train made its traditional unexplained halt. It seems that another train was hogging the station. We waited. I relished the hum of mildly violated silence, of stalled construction, and the cool shadows creeping across ...”