Search Results

“... the Tory leader had finished his set of tennis. Then there was the drink. Margot denounces F.E. Smith for drinking too much, ‘which is always ruinous to anyone’. She cannot have been unaware that her husband was lightly pickled a lot of the time and on a couple of occasions too soused to wind up a debate in the Commons. Not for nothing did George ...”

“... obscure or factitious’. ‘Are you allowed to be as funny as that about a sacred subject?’ Christopher Ricks, his commissioning editor, is said to have asked; and being funny is obviously an important element in the iconoclasm. When Ian Hamilton asked him to reflect on the contemporary poetry scene in 1972 for the Review, Carey duly noted some ...”

“... had made the island their home (the French Ministry of Culture’s website still claims that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered the island’); the suppression and expulsion of the island’s Indigenous population in the 17th century; the transfer of enslaved people from Africa to work on sugar cane and coffee plantations; the abolition of slavery in ...”

“... material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher Isherwood, and proposed that he should provide her with a substitute by marrying her. Isherwood backing down, Auden – who all his life seems to have retained and exercised his own very special form of gentlemanliness – had the buck passed on to ...”

“... never did, to work his critical observations up into a coherent theory; others, like Grover Smith, read what he had read, so far as this could be ascertained, and examined his sources with what looked like, but cannot quite have been, exhaustive care: for recently there has been a boom in such research. A procession of students combs the archives in New ...”

“... of blues records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The property that the postgraduate Marks ...”

“... era, this kind of shoe – and its regional name – migrated south. In the New Yorker recently Christopher Glazek discussed the way hoodies became ‘elite’ and it’s a general vector of fashion that it plunders the slums for its styles, just as it’s a fashion photographer’s cliché to shoot, in graffiti-spattered rust-belt ruins, luxuries that ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”

“... book, which is altogether too languorous. The film also stars, almost inevitably, Sir C. Aubrey Smith who, as in many films before and during the Second War, stood for probity and honour (though with a twinkle).5 July. Anna Massey dies. She was always fun and she got better as an actress as she got older, though I only worked with her twice. None of the ...”

“... who (like Milton and Bunyan) found ways of shaping their ideals around the needs of the moment. Christopher Wren built his churches around congregations – ‘In our reformed religion it would seem vain to make a Parish Church larger than that all who are present can both hear and see’; and Purcell comparably trained his music into an art of ...”

“... in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ...”

“... members of TCBS were killed on the Western Front: Rob Gilson on the first day of the Somme, G.B. Smith from shell wounds a few months after. ‘My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight . . . there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon,’ Smith had ...”

“... taken in January 1997 at his 50th birthday celebrations, with Billy Corgan, Lou Reed and Robert Smith. This was the period when he finally found inner calm and displayed outer happiness, relaxed into himself. But take a look at this photo: doesn’t he look a bit wizened, a bit unreal, like a doll of himself or a plastic action figure of a late-era rock ...”

“... texted her the name of the man she had been living with at the time of Nikki’s murder: David Smith, also known as David Bell, also known as David Boyd.By the time Lisa Theaker, then a detective chief inspector, was asked to look at the case in early 2016, Sharon had a long list of suspects. Aware of the potential of Y-STR, Theaker met the DNA expert ...”

“... out of a bus station. ‘Where is the baby?’ the junior counsel for the prosecution, Joel Smith KC, repeatedly asked. He claimed that because Victoria wasn’t visible in the footage, it proved the couple were carrying her in the shopping bag. Eventually a visibly frustrated Marten said: ‘Can we zoom in?’ When the footage was enlarged, it became ...”