Search Results

“... and schools. It is the apparent similarity between the third and fourth waves that animates Desmond King’s Making Americans. Yet his deeply researched and closely reasoned book has ambitions well beyond its immediate subject. He isn’t much concerned with the motives or circumstances that prompted these people to migrate in the first place; and ...”

“... is stuffed. It was barely noticed earlier this year when Northern & Shell, owned by the porn king Richard Desmond, pulled its funding from the PCC. As a result, the commission can’t deal with complaints against N&S titles, including the Express, Star and OK! magazine. Not that external regulation has worked ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... overthrew the Medici in November 1494, which resulted from the arrival in the region of the French King Charles VIII with a large army and which was mounted by members of the Florentine political aristocracy: indeed, up to that time he had, as head of a convent which was a Medici foundation, naturally rather genuflected to the family. His main ...”

“... Peel, alongside British trade goods). Not for nothing did the Bishop of Oxford crown him the ‘King of Siluria’. But Murchison’s geological expansionism became more threatening. His Silurian began devouring Sedgwick’s Cambrian below, leading to a period of bitter recrimination. Sedgwick was constantly forced to fight a rearguard action, attempting to ...”

“... pretensions in the ray cast by death’), and so did the labours of his assiduous biographer, Desmond Graham, who now brings us this thorough but often rather dull selection of Douglas’s letters. In 1974, the anniversary of Douglas’s death was marked far more lavishly than anyone could have easily predicted thirty years before: there was Graham’s ...”

“... philosophy of human nature. The founding father was Konrad Lorenz, who followed the vastly popular King Solomon’s Ring with the immensely influential On Aggression. Then came The Naked Ape (Desmond Morris) and The Territorial Imperative (Robert Ardrey), which made the idea of aggression in defence of territory a household ...”

“... in 1991, of killing Mark MacPhail, a police officer working as a security guard at a Burger King near Savannah. MacPhail had tried to intervene during an assault in a car park and was shot dead. No gun was ever found, and there was no DNA evidence to tie the murder to Davis, but ballistic evidence suggested a link to a gun he’d used in another ...”

“... scent lying heavy on the air. It was hard to think a man slept in this room. She looked at the king-sized expanse of the bed. It was covered by a light quilt, off-white, a sepia pattern faint against it, a paisley swirl in vegetable dye. It looked as if it had been washed many times, beaten on stones by a woman standing in a stream. But this was not ...”

“... genealogies (still not published). There were references to Dagobert II, the Merovingian king, to Sion, and to treasure said to be Merovingian. The consequences of the discovery were odd. Saunière was sent to Paris with the two documents, and came into contact with some leading figures in the literary and artistic world, all of whom were interested ...”

“... the talent for comedy revealed in her letters. Staying in Rye with Alec Vidler, former dean of King’s College, Cambridge, who was helping her with research for The Knox Brothers, she described the house party to her daughter: a trendy cleric, his dull wife, a long-skirted daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to ...”

“... poets he must have known that he was asking for trouble. Trouble duly came in the shape of Sir Desmond MacCarthy, who doggedly stood up in the Sunday Times for the quality of Tennyson’s mind, deplored Auden’s account of the great man as ‘very patronising’, then sought to out-patronise him in turn: ‘It reads as if Mr Auden had been feeling while ...”

“... a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and ...”

“... with a view to his extending his fascinations to a wider public. There follows a note to Desmond MacCarthy suggesting – surely with the firm touch of a provincial or a Victorian survivor – that it would be better if the New Quarterly were called instead the Quarterly Herald or Quarterly Clarion, ‘or some such’. The first of these letters ...”

“... dead except for Empson and myself) and was delighted at how well we all got on together. ‘King of the Cats’ (to use Yeats’s phrase about himself), to whom we all paid homage, was Basil Bunting, now in his eighties, who wrote his masterpiece, Briggflatts, at the age of 65 on returning to the North of England, after many years of adventurous Middle ...”