Search Results

“... conservative.Mass Observation was a quintessentially Thirties idea. Its two principal founders, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, were Cambridge drop-outs and (Madge more seriously than Harrisson) poets. Madge (‘a rather inactive Communist’) was interested in the random ...”

“... various ways, throw light on the issue of whether ameliorism worked. Did the experts do any good? Charles Madge and Peter Willmott compare Inner-City Poverty in Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers given at the ...”

“... a volume written as an exercise in academic sociology. This was Art Students Observed (1973), by Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, part of Faber’s Society Today and Tomorrow series. The authors’ research was funded by the Social Science Research Council. One suspects that Madge took the leading role in the ...”

“... brainchild of the charismatic ornithologist turned anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the Marxist poet Charles Madge and (briefly) the experimental filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. It attempted to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ by ‘observing’ ordinary Britons as they went about their ordinary lives – and by enlisting those same people as diarists ...”

“... power. Jennings’s conception of Mass-Observation, like that of his friend and fellow founder Charles Madge, was broadly Surrealist. The project began at the end of 1936 with a letter Madge wrote to the New Statesman arguing that the abdication crisis and the burning down of the Crystal Palace had produced a ...”

“... very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and Kathleen Raine, Humphrey Jennings and Julian Trevelyan. In 1935 he published both his Poems and his second important work of literary criticism, Some Versions of Pastoral. In August 1937 he set out on another Oriental adventure when he ...”

“... ordinary reader. ‘The point about writing as plainly as you can,’ Empson wrote to his friend Charles Madge in 1937, ‘is that you are testing your ideas against somebody who is not a specialist and just knows about life in general. Really subjective writing seems to me to be nasty to touch.’ The writer can’t be servile but he must be ...”

“... were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and stylesetter Madge Garland (1898-1990). Cohen’s account of their richly oxymoronic erotic lives – lives at once hard to see and hard to miss, archly recondite and recklessly available – will no doubt confound Poet Ladies everywhere. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be ...”

“... Jane Eyre) to omniscient overview, swallowing generations and decades in disrespectful summary: ‘Madge had escaped long ago by marrying an adulterous bank clerk in Mirfield and producing another three children.’ Behind the Scenes at the Museum begins, in homage to Tristram Shandy, with Ruby Lennox’s conception; from her mother’s womb, she offers an ...”

“... occupied a senior role at Maison Worth, the French fashion house opened by an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth (a Galliano avant la lettre), though that wasn’t until after her time at Vogue. Worth plays an important part in the Vogue story, though, and in the story of fashion altogether. Le Grand Worth, the first couture auteur, started the ...”

“... was mocked by the critics was her lack of discrimination. In some ways she resembled ‘Mad Madge’, the Duchess of Newcastle of Pepys’s day, a literary fantasist who was not above putting herself into her scripts. A Victorian editor said that the Duchess’s exuberant fancy was ‘ruined by deficient culture, by literary dissipation and the absence ...”