Category: another question answered
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Drawing for The Exquisite Corpse by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Hérold and Yves Tanguy, 1935. HOW TO OPEN AT WILL THE WINDOW ONTO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES IN THE WORLD AND ELSEWHERE With a large brush spread black gouache,…
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. In his recent LRB article on Wikileaks, “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks” (recommended), Slavoj Žižek (2011) answers: . In Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: ‘Imagine you inadvertently enter…
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“Temptation”, from a German version of the Vita of Adam & Eve. Marina Warner in the article “Bananas” (1995) answers: In the seventeenth century, when savants were as keen on gardening as on the Bible, the general opinion of herbalists…
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Warning: the material below may disturb some. Angela Carter (1878 1978) in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History answers: Many pornographic novels are written in the first person as if by a woman, or use a woman as the…
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In the final paragraph of his London: The Biography (2001), Peter Ackroyd answers: [W]hen it is asked how London can be a triumphant city when it has so many poor, and so many homeless, it can only be suggested that…
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Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography (2001) answers (see below). What is Hong Kong’s colour, I wonder? Red is London’s colour. The cabs of the early nineteenth century were red. The pillar boxes are red. The telephone boxes were, until…
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In his article “So you ‘like’ Hamlet? Sorry, that’s not good enough” in today’s Times (see here), John Sutherland mentions that in the last years of Frank Kermode‘s life, one of the questions that vexed him was ‘Why doesn’t literary criticism…
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Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) answers: Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China. Its considerable population, 100-130 million compared with Europe’s…
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Nicholas Ostler answers in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): The decline of English, when it begins, will not seem of great moment.International English is a lingua franca, and by its nature, a lingua franca…
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Nicholas Ostler answers in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): Chinese, like all the great languages of the modern world excepting English and French, remains very much a localized language in eastern and southeastern Asia,…
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The answer can be found in Doubt, the 2008 film adaptation of the John Patrick Shanley’s stage play Doubt: A Parable, which won a Pulitzer Prize: A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew…
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“How They Met Themselves” (1860-64) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Umberto Eco once wrote, ‘Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.’ But where…
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[More about Eadweard Muybridge here.] Nicholas Royle in The Uncanny (2003) answers: It is usually traced back to 1876, to a man called Boirac who wrote: ‘It has happened that, seeing for the first time a monument, a landscape, a person,…
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In her hugely enjoyable book, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (first published in 1994 — mine is the Vintage’s 1995 version) the mythographer, novelist and historian Marina Warner answers: The earliest extant version of ‘Cinderella’ to…
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–Samuel Johnson in The Rambler (1750) answers: If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of…
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–A.D. Nuttall in Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (1980) answers: Greek tragedy owes its special force to the stratified coexistence of two ethical worlds. The older stratum is one in which men…
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––In a discussion of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Harold Bloom (2004) answers: Since Innocence and Experience are states of the soul through which we pass, neither is a finality, both are necessary, and neither is wholly preferable…
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James Wood (2008) answers: The kind of metaphor I most delight in […] estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling…
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–Ian McEwan (2001) answers: [I]t was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest…
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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto answers: For almost uniquely, in the repertoire of modern Western cuisine, the oyster is eaten uncooked and unkilled. It is the nearest thing we have to “natural” food—the only dish which deserves to be called “au naturel” without…
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William Empson (1961) answers: Line references are to the nearest factor of five, because factor of ten are usually given in the margin of the text, and the eye can then find the place without further calculation. The show of…
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A.D. Nuttall (2003) answers: The word, I think, connotes a quality of completeness: at the lowest level, complete literacy (never a colon where a comma should be); complete, though not redundant documentation; complete accuracy even with reference to matters not…
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