Search Results

“... Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential Englishness ...”

“... century and earlier. The English were hopeless, a pathetic mixture of incompetence and arrogance. Alan of Galloway, with his two hundred ships, was the great warrior of the 13th century, Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, by contrast a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward ...”

“... aesthetic mode is the shadowy one of parody, as the current tone is the impassively ironic. Thus, Alan Brownjohn’s A Night in the Gazebo ends with a parody, an affectionate rewrite of Sir Gawain called ‘The Seventh Knight and the Green Cat’, which closes with a volte-face. Whatever Mr Brownjohn has to say he says ...”

“... Degas position the animals in Racehorses at Longchamps. He had reproductions of Dürer’s etching Knight, Death and the Devil and a copy of a frieze from the Parthenon back in the studio of his House of Pleasure. They are present in Riders on the Beach as well. Two hooded riders – death on horseback – lead the other horsemen to an endless horizon. There ...”

“... his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the limits set by the absurd. A boast might be self-serving like Confession But similarly festers if unheard. Much meekness stands revealed ...”

“... and of the little-known door-knocking code in Regency times: three raps for a gentleman, six for a knight, long and hard knocking for a nobleman. Or was the American visitor who reported this rule having his leg pulled? Those rich thrusters of the Grande Epoque, the self-made men destined to become the new ruling class, come in for expert dissection in The ...”

“... Sergeant Frank Troy, Mr Woodman.’In 1938, Honor’s sister Patricia married another Tory MP, Alan Lennox-Boyd. From this point, the Diaries give an unmatched account of clandestine queer life in that era. Channon developed a passion for having a ‘Turker’ or Turkish bath, not always for the purpose of losing weight. At the Royal Automobile Club there ...”

“... a prison sentence, as in the following lines from a poem called ‘La Luna’ (translated here by Alan Trueblood): Siempre se pierde lo esencial. Es una Ley de toda palabra sobre el numen. No la sabrá eludir este resumen De mi largo commercio con la luna. The essential thing is what we always miss. From this law no one will be immune nor will this account ...”

“... unsophisticated architect’s assistant, a new arrival in London from the country; and Henry Knight, an established, opinionated lawyer deeply at home in literary London (he also reviews books). Hardy’s fiction repeatedly stages not only the multiple courting of a heroine (Jude the Obscure switches genders and agency), but the tense sociology of ...”

“... Elizabethan playhouses (the Theatre and the Curtain) to the Security Express building where Ronnie Knight, Clifford Saxe and the boys were alleged to have pulled off the robbery that funded the Brinks-Mat job at Heathrow. Knight was once married to Barbara Windsor, soubrette, Carry On whoopee cushion, diminutive EastEnders ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir Peter were not married; the knight had an obdurate wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered ...”

“... no doubt of his achievement. Our relationship resembled that between a teacher and a student, a knight and a squire, a sorcerer and his apprentice, a substance and a shadow, an officer and a recruit.At last I had someone to talk to, someone to whom I could confide my secret ambition – not to be a doctor, but a writer. Naipaul prided himself on having ...”

“... entered the national myth of pointless sacrifice and heroic failure. Not quite in the spirit of Alan Bennett’s paradox-mongering media don in The History Boys (‘Those who had been genuinely caught napping by the attack on Pearl Harbor were the Japanese’), Figes suggests that ‘the charge was in some ways a success’ and that Balaklava might even ...”

“... Klein Man v. Ralph Lauren Man. The lengthy feature quoted experts from the menswear designer Alan Flusser to the fashion historian Anne Hollander, who noted that ‘Bush looking casual on his ranch appears as if he’s the master of untold acres … It looks as if he owns Texas rather than governs it.’ Gore’s efforts to look relaxed were mocked by ...”