So habituated are we to thinking of plot as a concession to an entrenched, anti-intellectual craving for story and decisive endings, as a sort of spoonful of sugar to make the medicine — the ideas — go down, that when we defend plot it tends to be on the grounds of human nature, which may be childish but is intractable (Didion is often quoted: "we tell ourselves stories in order to live").
So habituated are we to thinking of plot as a concession to an entrenched, anti-intellectual craving for story and decisive endings, as a sort of spoonful of sugar to make the medicine the ideas go down, that when we defend plot it tends to be on the grounds of human nature, which may be childish but is intractable (Didion is often quoted: "we tell ourselves stories in order to live").
Craving intellectual and political prestige, the DIY jihadists receive helpful endorsements from the self-proclaimed paladins of the west, such as Michael Gove, Britain's leading American-style neocon.
Steppenwolf, the Herman Hesse novel about a washed-up intellectual's desperate craving for wisdom and a purpose in life, is in some ways a caricature of the bildungsroman, except imposed on a pretentious 40-something.
The suspicion is that, like many who have successfully clambered to wealth and influence, Ms Winfrey now craves intellectual respectability.
A 2011 graduate of Goldsmiths College, in London, Rajzak still craves intellectual pursuits and hopes to return for graduate school.
Through friends who were to remain faithful throughout her life, such as Waugh, Sir Harold Acton, Lord Berners and Sir John Betjeman, she was to enjoy the intellectual company she craved.
Craig brought Isadora the sexual and intellectual companionship she craved, the satisfaction of being linked with a great man (as she and he both saw him), and her first child, Deirdre.
Certain professions -- including writers, in-the-field natural scientists and behind-the-scenes tech workers -- can give introverts the intellectual stimulation they crave without the distracting environment they dislike.
They underscore his simultaneous craving for intellectual conversation and his impatience with the literary establishment and what he called "fashionable extremism" — "the hysterical, shallow and ignorant academic 'counterculture.' " And they point up the highly personal sources of much of his fiction: "You damn near killed me," he writes his ex-wife Sondra in one especially vituperative letter.
Others are frustrated by repetitive services that bear no relationship to their actual lives, when they crave meaningful intellectual stimulation or simply resent being bored.
