The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differen...ces of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow--despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral s...uicide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
all afternoon Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren... Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge Stand in a row and learn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Did I make you go insane? Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?... Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist who dragged you out like a golf cart? Did I make you go insane?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Voice number one says, "I am the leaves. I am the martyred.... Come unto me with death for I am the siren. I am forty young girls in green shells...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote; Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,... And as a bed I'll take them, and there lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she "allures" us to our death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, he...r temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Novels, with a few famous exceptions, usually pretend that we have never read a novel before in our lives, and may never read anot...her after this one. Movies, on the other hand, tend to assume that we spend every waking moment at the pictures, that anyone who has found his or her way to the cinema is a moviegoer, a regular, an addict.... Movies rely on our experience of other movies, on a living tradition of the kind that literary critics always used to be mourning for, because it died in the seventeenth century or fizzled out with D.H. Lawrence. The movie tradition, of course, specializes in light comedy, well-made thrillers, frothy musicals, and weepy melodramas, rather than in such works as Donne's Holy Sonnets or George Eliot's Middlemarch; and we shouldn't listen too seriously to the siren voices of those critics who claim big things for Hollywood movies as art. But there is a tradition. We have in our heads as we sit in the cinema a sense of all the films we have seen, a range of common reference which is the Greek and Latin of the movies, our classical education.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »