Search Results

“... glimpsed going into a Soho restaurant. He told me that Nicolas Bentley the illustrator, son of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, Chesterton’s schoolboy friend at St Paul’s, believed GKC was a suppressed homosexual. There was always something cloying, E.C. Bentley maintained, about GK’s friendship – he wanted too much from his male friends. It was an ...”

“... never assist horsemanship’ was the verdict of General Sir William Furse who watched the young Edmund Allenby riding at Staff College in 1896-7. Six foot, two inches tall, with a 44-inch chest and a hearty appetite for food and drink, Allenby dominated man and horse alike by brute size. His heavy-seated horsemanship did not prevent him from being elected ...”

“... prophets, its – horrible temper’), H.L. Mencken’s jocular scrutiny of the American language, Edmund Wilson’s cold eye cast alike on political rhetoric, Depression politics and American sex, Norman Mailer’s exploding and exploiting of American myths, are notable instances. And this hasn’t only been a male preserve: witness the admirable Janet ...”

“... childhood; and that in Late Victorian autobiographical writing – as by Wilde or George Moore or Edmund Gosse – a new note of deliberate self-dramatisation appears. In places, Buckley engages in unacceptable oversimplification. He argues, for instance, that Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are autobiographical novels of a broadly ...”

“... but assures her that ‘it will be splendid ... to pass with such companions as I have.’ Dr Wilson, according to his obituary in the Times, ‘beautifully lit up the wastes’, and Scott, in his last message, found in the tent with the three bodies, declared: ‘We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which ...”

“... and excretion and their relationship to literary activity has attracted previous scholars, and Edmund Wilson’s essay of 1948, ‘Morose Ben Jonson’, is perhaps the best known example of what it can lead to. Anxious to pin the desperate label ‘anal neurotic’ on the poet, Wilson duly listed ...”

“... to laugh at a person, than to do him any real injury’. As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, ‘the occasion of laughter and the mean that maketh us merry … is the fondness, the filthiness, the deformity, and all such evil behaviour as we see to be in other[s].’ In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton made the same point from ...”

“... Collinson has written two earlier major works, one on Elizabethan Puritanism, the other a life of Edmund Grindal, Elizabeth’s defiant Archbishop of Canterbury. Here he moves forward into the reign of James I. This has been the dark period of the Church of England: the middle ground lost between books on the English Revolution and the Elizabethan Church on ...”

“... a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and ...”

“... say, the sophistication of the Federalist Papers. There are of course the American speeches of Edmund Burke, and they still read wonderfully. But they were heard by men trained to understand nothing but the absolute sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively ...”

“... of the exiled Stuart Court, and emerging as a writer for pay under the imprint of the notorious Edmund Curll – can, however, be tracked. Jane Barker, Exile isn’t so much a biography of Barker as ‘the biography of a remarkable literary career’. To tell the story of a literary career, remarkable or not (and whether this one was remarkable is one of ...”

“... went to Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917, when British forces commanded by General Sir Edmund Allenby were overrunning Palestine. ‘Weizmann’s principal achievement,’ Segev writes, ‘was to create among British leaders an identity between the Zionist movement and “world Jewry” – Lloyd George referred to “the Jewish race”, “world ...”

“... subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway without throwing in a series of quick ...”

“... sport, but in the late Nineties it suddenly looks like the critical craze of the moment. Richard Wilson, for example, published an article in the TLS a few months ago reviving the claim that the young William Shakespeare can be identified with the actor William Shakeshafte who is named in the will of one of ...”

“... is always stimulated to an astonishing degree by clever blackguardism’) he hired Lockhart and Wilson, a couple of Scottish lawyers as blackguardly as they were cynical. ‘Wilson was tall, burly, fair-haired, florid-complexioned, gregarious: Lockhart small, dark, atrabilious, conspiratorial.’ What does that sentence ...”