Search Results

“... the drive. Edwina’s dog, Snippet, ran out to greet her mistress. That was the worst of all. Janet Morgan, A Life of Her Own From the very first page of this book (‘Sir Ernest was larger than life’) to the very last (‘Truth is stranger than fiction’) the cliché is entirely sovereign. It is a sentimental cliché, compared to which Evangeline ...”

“... At first sight Janet Morgan does not seem the obvious person to choose as the official biographer of Agatha Christie. She describes herself on the jacket of the book as a ‘writer and consultant’, who now ‘advises governments, companies and other organisations on long-range strategic planning, new technology and different approaches to whatever they find themselves doing ...”

“... heirs have now abandoned. The first question is whether we can trust this text. The editor, Janet Morgan, with her experience of putting the later volumes of Diaries of a Cabinet Minister into shape, has adopted similar methods here. The original diaries run with some breaks from October 1951 to December 1963 – some three million words in ...”

“... and anecdotes – on M.O. Mathai, for instance – and on available private archives, of the kind Janet Morgan used in her biography of Edwina Mountbatten. The critics who accused Wolpert of bias could have fruitfully spent part of their energy demanding that those standing guard over Nehru’s papers, for less than honest reasons, release them for use ...”

“... great novels of the century, The Man Who Loved Children. When my story appeared someone wrote to Janet Frame recommending it. She wrote to say how much she’d enjoyed it but asking why I was now writing as a woman. This confusion was sorted out when I found that the next issue of the Kenyon Review contained Christina Stead’s novella ‘The Puzzle-Headed ...”

“... loathed and feared and needed the approval of her snobbish, dull, shrieking and ambitious mother Janet Lee Bouvier as much as Maisie loathed and feared and needed her mother; she flirted with her father, who drank and spent money and flirted in turn with anyone who came his way. Her parents made no secret of their disastrous marriage and the great gap ...”

“... Labour will plunge once more into debating its own history. Not reluctantly, because as Kenneth Morgan points out, the Party ‘has been captivated, even obsessed, by its history’; even more than the Conservatives it is, he says, ‘a prisoner of its past’. Yet the debate will probably be more painful than in the recent past, because it will need to be ...”

“... Jocelyn Rickards had begun her career as a stage and film designer. She created the costumes for Morgan, The Knack and From Russia with Love; her accounts of her work on these productions are dispatched with less detail and a lot less vim than her descriptions of celebrities. While she was working on the film of Look back in anger she met the ...”

“... he find any of these people, we asked? Yes, he would try. The following week Jo Mennel and John Morgan, the reporter, went back to interview the Rhyl witnesses on camera. Over a cup of tea in a café, Terry Evans gave them the disappointing news that he could not find the main man he was looking for, a newspaper-seller called Charlie Jones. As the ...”

“... do Hay, Brown and Lewis Grassic Gibbon owe to Stevenson? Very little, perhaps, unless ‘Thrawn Janet’ or the melodramatic boldness of Jekyll and Hyde left their mark. Edwin Morgan has chosen well from the earlier satirical poetry of Scotland, the strengths of which show up his contemporary selection to its distinct ...”

“... journey to India, when two men found themselves together on the forward deck … The first man, Morgan Forster, was 33 years of age.’ This modulates quickly into free indirect style, which Galgut does well. At least some of the time, though, he seems not to want the reader to be lulled by illusionistic effects. An essayistic tone jumps out of stretches of ...”

“... left Norwich to spend a few months with the family of a Unitarian minister, George Cadogan Morgan, at Southgate in Middlesex. She called on Godwin, who reproved her for residing outside London and foregoing ‘the society & advantages of the metropolis’, and Alderson replied that in staying with the Morgans she was ‘governed’ by her ...”

“... insulation from the rest of the world. This can go too far. Some of her narration has a stunned, Janet-and-John quality. But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back towards New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to Carol’s house for a while, and Therese ...”

“... culture: Burns and MacDiarmid in Scots and English, Sorley MacLean in Gaelic – and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and Gaelic. The two largest – The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 ...”

“... women writers before Jane Austen’ are an arbitrary bunch, many obtained from a hacker’s job on Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800. Spender calls this a ‘Dictionary of Women Novelists’ – a significant blunder. Todd covers poets, dramatists, letter-writers and essayists, whereas Spender, after a perfunctory look ...”