Search Results

“... of notice. Her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, stops around the time of her marriage to John MacBride in 1902, when she was 36. (The queen in question is of course Cathleen ni Houlihan, not Victoria.) There are two biographies, by Samuel Levenson (1976) and Nancy Cadozo (1977), and, like the excellent notes and introductions in the present ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even mentioned John Major as ‘a close friend’. The programme-makers arranged further such meetings, one in a Spanish castle, to which Greer was asked to invite his contacts. Greer’s network of helpful politicians was about to be exposed when Central Television and its new ...”

“... of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience. I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the ...”

“... books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare. It seemed run of the mill at the time, much like the other books in the library: it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist ...”

“... at the tasks that two spinster ladies ‘of feeble constitution and rather nervous temperament’ took on. Indefatigable and undaunted, they ventured to places as ‘dark as Africa’. The glass-house workers of Nailsea lived in a row of 19 ‘hovels’, with about ten inhabitants in every house. Both sexes and all ages herding together; voluptuous beyond ...”

“... reverted to resembling, in the American mind, something far worse than partes infidelium. The John Birch Society, an important orchestrator of American paranoia in the 1950s, was named for an American missionary who had supposedly been martyred by the Reds. Indeed, the Cold War and McCarthyite atmosphere in the United States was attributable much more to ...”

“... rewriting A Vision and working on many of the astonishing poems of the ‘Byzantium’ period. It took several fruitless enquiries to locals, and then a lengthy investigation by a Tourist Office official who eventually disinterred a file of literary notes, to find that Yeats’s Via Americhe has changed its name, like much in Rapallo. Even the little ...”

“... Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore ...”

“... are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up for a second book of psychogeography, describing their pilgrimages to the sites of poets’ deaths (but not their ...”

“... who did not want any more children, but these were entirely private and so have gone unrecorded. John Christopoulos has meticulously pieced together a secret history not only from prescriptive sources but from the public records of trials, giving us for the first time a sense of the way early modern women and men experienced abortion. Trials inevitably ...”

“... I lose my Drag Race virginity. Season 14 was midway through; over the course of two evenings, he took me through the first seven episodes, each an hour long.Back on my own sofa, I returned to Season 1, first broadcast in 2009. I cantered through to the Season 5 finale. Over the next twelve months, I watched all fifteen seasons of US Drag Race, then all ...”

“... story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of ...”

“... use his leg muscles again – ‘to tense the quadriceps’, to feel again that earlier power that took him to Norway, that took him to the bull. And it is gone. It’s being gone also allows Sacks to reconnect himself to his internal account of the history of neurology, since he has become a sufferer from Babinski’s ...”

“... was sustained by the use of strategies including the exposure of unwanted infants. Christianity took shape in part by reacting against the values of the age, in part by internalising them. Christians across the ages have put an awful lot of effort into avoiding sex altogether. Celibacy wasn’t particularly prized in the ancient world, but in ...”