Search Results

“... upon Britain. One’s sense of Buchan the man, as derived from the excellent and engaging memoir by his son William, is of someone vastly enjoying life. How else could anyone have done so much and covered so much paper – more than a million words in Nelson’s History of the War alone? But then the consciousness of giving pleasure on such a scale (and it ...”

“... entred into him and never left him till he came into the country again.’ He had been surrounded by whores, ladies of the Court, and fellow rakes, but now his wife, children, his mother and her chaplain were by his bed. He was in the country, it is true, but there is an extra irony in the fact that instead of dying in the ...”

“... of the character traits which she looks for in a prospective husband. ‘I would require him to be free in all his thoughts, true in all his words, generous in all his actions – ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in love, disinterested in both … the champion of the feeble, the firm opponent of the powerful oppressor – not to ...”

“... Prospero-figure in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall. Maggie replies by eating a handful of pills, and the scene then twists and turns between Quentin’s acknowledged guilt and his defiant belief that she would have done it anyway. Miller survived the long suicide of Marilyn Monroe, but his muse fell silent. Joe DiMaggio, his ...”

“... He felt that we (I myself was one of the ‘wimp’ critics he objected to) had been made nervous by his powerful masculinity and, to cover up our fear, we had tried to get macho with his book. Mailer was angry, says The Face, and he was spoiling for a fight. What is it with these New York lit-celebs? A year or two ago, Gore Vidal published a book-length ...”

“... people, was not at all opposed to the censorship of his time. ‘Let us have a strict censorship by all means, but not a senseless one,’ he writes to a friend, as if strictness (strogost) were a cosy and reassuring fact of Russian life, as it might be in England village cricket or well-rolled umbrellas. How else explain ...”

“... length, well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger. In these Diaries Taylor wrote about the early days of CND, his contempt for the ...”

“... edition of Milton’s minor poetry. ‘I imagine that it is in your possession. If that should be the case, I shall be extremely obliged to you, if you lend it to me for a few days.’ (Malone had previously had to base his text of the poem on a later edition.) The book duly wings its way to London on the coach from ...”

“... It’s rare to be able to test a book against one’s own direct experience of its subject-matter. I therefore make full use of mine, as a pupil at Shrewsbury School in the Fifties. In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench,* one-time headmaster of Eton, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals ...”

“... opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity ...”

“... Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of uncase by stressing how smart and cheerful she, was how little her drug addiction appeared to affect her. Such loyal friends did not wish her to be regarded as a pathological case – although since Kavan had constant access to clean ...”

“... When the logic of crisis is put in motion, the outlook further darkens. In Moody’s novels, to be born is a crime, and to grow up compounds the offence. The enclosed residences of American affluence are under a curse – nature and neuroses will contrive to bring them low. Moody delivers this dark verdict in a casual, off-hand prose. His miniature family ...”

“... In the centre of the most beautiful painting by Correggio in the Louvre there is a knot of flesh as intricate and lively as a swimming octopus. It consists of the left hand of the Virgin Mary delicately supporting the slightly smaller right hand of Saint Catharine, while the much smaller hand of the infant Christ tenderly picks out the Saint’s ring finger ...”

“... 1918 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. Many readers have been enchanted by its candour, and many more by its teases, distortions and evasions. A product of his historical detachment, literary skill and privileged position as the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, Adams’s review of ...”

“... work led to the banning of DDT in agricultural settings around the world, but it was replaced by a new generation of pesticides, the most widely used of which, neonicotinoids, are hugely more toxic to insects. The first neonicotinoid came on the market in 1991. By the end of the decade, anecdotal evidence suggested that ...”