Saturday, 30 May 2015

More like a war fought at sea than on land

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He had been up at the front and he'd be going back there next week. Or wherever the front by then was - that indeterminate confusion of...
Friday, 22 May 2015

That war [WW2] seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice.

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Yates's stories and novels return repeatedly to the weakness and hysterical anxiety of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity. His ...
Thursday, 21 May 2015

The novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people

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There are large contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical sceptic is also the great sermonising bully, not only telling ...
Tuesday, 12 May 2015

And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?

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'And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?' 'Just in the nick of time. She's slip...
Monday, 11 May 2015

Pedantry and non-pedantry are indications only of temperament, not of culinary skill

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And while we're about it: pedantry and non-pedantry are indications only of temperament, not of culinary skill. Non-pedants frequently ...
Thursday, 30 April 2015

The only product of the forces of evolution capable of understandingits own origins

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He remembered a time at Bart's, holding a human brain in his hands for the first time, being amazed by the weight of it. This blown egg...
Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so farencountered much to be cynical about

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Potts  had been a science student at Manchester University, bright, articulate, cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so ...