Citations

She decided to settle in Bournemouth, and in 1980 tried for several months to sell her London home. But each time a buyer turned up, the sky would darken and there would be a foul smell in the house, or so she told her...

the Apples, Googles and Spotifys of the world

The other is expressed in flurries of construction activity—dust, noise, machines, workers, trucks carting off piles of mud—as if mining companies were extracting something precious from beneath the well-tended stucco of...

Those Scots who want independence are less concerned about being part of the same country as Middlesbrough or Ipswich than they are about London.

Its arts of hedonism are reaching unprecedented levels: its restaurants get better or at least more ambitious and its bars offer cocktails previously unknown to man (coconut seviche, for example, where, as its makers put it,...

Joseph Conrad, whose prose he sometimes queried, but who embodied that intention to the extent that he was described by Virginia Woolf as one who “had been gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a...

Thomas Harrison wrote a handsome book on the topic called “Essayism: Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello,”

In his unfinished novel “The Man Without Qualities,” the early 20th-century Austrian writer Robert Musil coined a term for this leakage. He called it “essayism” (Essayismus in German) and he called those who live by it...

what Michel Foucault would have called the “epistémé” — a kind of conspiracy at the level of language and ideas and metaphor

It was important for Maury to be in the money and he made a fortune more than once. He played the anti-intellectual (while secretly reading books), and when his brother won the Nobel Prize he felt they had honoured the wrong...