Search Results

“... during his first four years of study. In the fifth, though, he dropped out of the top ranks of his class and by the summer of 1869 he had withdrawn and abandoned his hopes of the priesthood. He enrolled in the law faculty (which was easier to get into) at St Petersburg University and then – in a move common for ambitious but underqualified defectors from the ...”

“... study of the Brontës, an autobiographical account of her time with a nursing unit in World War One and scores of short stories, essays and poems. Her great literary works tell of the inner lives of quiet women – Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) – and of the shattering effects of ...”

“... death at the Somme, but in fact George had resented the outbreak of the Second South African War as an interruption to his shooting (family funerals ditto), and he kept up the slaughter during the First World War, sending pheasants as gifts to military hospitals.Marriage was another refuge from inanition. Since Mary of ...”

“... Simplicius. Very strong affinities of atmosphere connect the Germany of the Thirty Years War, which Grimmelshausen portrayed, with the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s which is the obsessive concern of Grass’s ‘Danzig Trilogy’. These are affinities which are not encompassed by Mann’s imagination, or by the imagination of many writers of ...”

“... background a society not primarily as a set of economic classes but as a patriarchy. The English class system, its pervasiveness, its endless subtleties, had once been a rich source for the English novel. The system whose laws, customs, religion and culture consistently sanction the economic ascendancy of one sex over another could be a still richer ...”

“... in north-west Syria. Her husband was killed in March while fighting on the government side in the war, her mother and father are dead, and she is the youngest in her impoverished family. ‘When my husband was killed, I was pregnant,’ she said, ‘and my parents-in-law decided to keep me with them and marry me to my husband’s youngest brother, which is ...”

“... book appeared. Walzer focuses on his opposition to America’s entry into the First World War. Then comes Martin Buber, whose chapter concerns itself with his relations to the emergent state of Israel. Next we have a famous Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, and a famous Italian ex-Communist, Ignazio Silone. After this, George Orwell is discussed ...”

“... and Concord’. At the time it was not apparent that this skirmishing marked the beginning of the War of American Independence. A year later, Horne’s conduct could be portrayed as offering encouragement to rebels, and a prosecution for seditious libel was initiated, which came to court in 1777. Horne pointed out that his notice should be seen in a peacetime ...”

“... somewhere to complete their life-cycle. My father went out to West Africa during the Second World War. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was based in Lagos, Jos in Northern Nigeria (where they grow strawberries and new potatoes on the plateau all year round) and in the Gold Coast. We have a picture of him, very young and thin, sitting on a cane chair ...”

“... of period emanates from the poems in Part Two of this volume – ‘Mainly from The Middle of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944)’: There is a hard thin gun on Clapham Common. Deserted yachts in the mud at Greenwich. In a hospital at Ealing notices Which read WOMEN GASSED and WOMEN NOT GASSED. This is that curious first winter of the ...”

“... Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer at the National Theatre, to the newly opened gallery at the Imperial War Museum, public awareness of the fate of European Jews is probably greater now than at any time in recent memory. The one place it hasn’t penetrated, however, is the current debate about Britain’s treatment of refugees. If it had, those politicians who ...”

“... from Algeria, having left for metropolitan France and become cut off from North Africa by the war. (Henceforth, apart from occasional visits, Algeria would remain a distant prospect, on which he gazed with ever greater dismay.) By 1943 he was living in Paris and working for Gallimard. In the last five months of the German occupation he was also running ...”

“... of ‘the Jewish community’. And in the East End of London, the elemental problems of working-class life – birth, survival and death – were essentially the same, regardless of ethnic identity or national origin. If it is difficult to define the Anglo-Jewish community satisfactorily at any given moment, then by definition it is even harder to write its ...”

“... Guardsman William Humphrey Griffiths of the British Army, both recruited from German prisoner-of-war camps. While broadcasting for Büro S, they lived in an apartment in Berlin, wore civilian clothes, were provided with supplies of tobacco and alcohol and, if they liked, were escorted once a week to a nearby brothel.The announcers of Büro S thus lived quite ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld, you could say, has had a remarkable career, stretching from a middle-class upbringing amid wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W ...”