Category: another question answered
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[Click image to enlarge] In Ways of Seeing, John Berger answers: When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can…
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In Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (1997), Geoff Dyer answers: I also thought of knocking on the door of our old house, explaining that I was born there, that I lived there until I was eleven,…
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In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins answers: A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts…
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Frederic Gable – According to Margaret Drabble in a Guardian article, the last stanza of Lord Byron‘s “Love and Death” contains ‘the greatest split infinitive in literature’. Byron wrote the poem in 1824, shortly before he died. The poem was…
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– In “Wondering what to give up for New Year? A few suggestions”, Charlie Brooker answers: A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping. And once you’ve got through the clown puke there’s nothing but a fistful of…
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from Bernard Porter’s LRB article on Julia Lovell’s The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China: When it came to explaining their humiliations, the Chinese tended not to blame the invaders so much as themselves, or their Manchu…
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Rene Magritte’s “The False Mirror” William Henry Davies in his poem “Leisure” answers: Leisureby W.H. Davies WHAT is this life if, full of careWe have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long…
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“Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” (1932) -Picasso ––– The HugBy Thom Gunn It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined Half of the night with our old friend Who’d showed us in the end To a bed I reached…
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Louis MacNeice in Autumn Journal (1939) answers: If it is something feasible, obtainable,…..Let us dream it now,And pray for a possible land…..Not of sleepwalkers, not of angry puppets,But where both hand and brain can understand…..The movements of our fellows;Where life is…
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Kim Newman in Anno Dracula (2011 [1991]) answers: The Chinese movie tradition of the hopping vampire (jiang shi or geung si) is one of the odder strains of vampirism. I saw Ricky Lau’s Mr Vampire (1985) in London’s Chinatown before the…
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James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) answers: A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections…
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In Alias Grace (1996), Margaret Atwood answers from a woman’s perspective: [Y]ou may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for…
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Quote of the day – Pamuk on ‘dissatisfaction’ I was reading the “The New Lyric Studies” section of the January 2008 edition of PMLA but found the interview with Orhan Pamuk interesting as well. In it, Pamuk talks about his…
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“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And…
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Kyoko Mori answers in One Bird (1995): I raise my left arm and begin to wave as the birds disappear over the neighbor’s houses, and my eyes ache from staring into the sky. I know they will be back among the…
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The Kiss (1897-8) by Munch Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, answers in a Guardian article: [Virginia Woolf] wrote not at all about sex. Her entire body of work contains two romantic kisses – one in The Voyage Out, another…
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…and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee . – Donne In the review article “Hubbub”, Nicholas Spice answers: [T]he most poignant encounters with music are inadvertent and unplanned. Church bells heard across the fields…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated. ‘Love is a standing, or still growing light / And his first…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: He felt unreal in London, as though his flesh and blood were in abeyance, as though he was a simulacrum of a boy, floating along Gower Street with its prim houses, dodging…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: Money was freedom. Money was aesthetic. Money was Arab stallions, not rough cobs. Money was not being shouted at. […] Money was freedom. Money was life. -p. 59 How poor can one…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: The parents […] found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with…
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Click the image to learn more about the object – – “It’s easy for an ungrateful recipient to become unworthy of a gift, and conversely, a gift given without worthy intentions is one which can be rejected as worthless.” (p.…
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The Managing Housewife J. H. Gray’s poem “The Girls that are Wanted” (c. 1880) might give you some ideas. The girls that are wanted are good girls Good from the heart to the lips Pure as the lily is white…
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Isobel Armstrong praises photography; and a certain person’s justification of her obsession with (her own) images. “The very fact that [the photograph] emerges from a fleeting moment in time means that that time is irrevocably lost. Even to exchange the…
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“The Pleasant truth” (1966) by rene MAGRITTE Emily Dickinson answers: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightening to the Children eased With explanation kind The…
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