Search Results

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming ...”

“... but not overwhelmingly so. Beyond the Blade found that roughly half of all teenage knife deaths took place outside London and that the great majority of people killed with knives weren’t Black. Official studies, such as a report published in 2020 by the Mayor of London’s office, tend to conclude that a combination of poverty, childhood ...”

“... absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate with good stories.’ And in case you think it’s just a boy thing, Michiko Kakutani, awarded a Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and ...”

“... The lines were later produced in court as evidence against her. The following day the police took her to the villa to quiz her on site. They gave her protective boots and gloves to wear; ‘Ta-dah,’ she sang when she put them on. This came up in court too, as proof she wasn’t taking the murder seriously. Knox says she merely ‘wanted to be friendly ...”

“... was in Paris as minister of munitions).As battle raged in the last week of July, Channon took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was ...”

“... Garden of England’ (the title Inglis gives his Chapter 6), but in the Fifties, when Raymond took up a tutorship and residence there, was (as it still is) a run-down seaside resort. The Workers’ Educational Association was not started in 1906 nor the BBC in 1926. The Daily Herald, ‘that much lamented Labour paper’, died in the Sixties (when it ...”

“... A piece of ass is two bucks and the swimming is great in the summer.’ In the early 1960s, John Hopkins, a graduate of Princeton, kept diaries of his visits to Paul and Jane Bowles: ‘Their intimacy is more fraternal than sexual. They live in separate apartments, one above the other, and communicate by a squeaking mauve toy telephone.’ Jane fell in ...”

“... to battle comparable with Buchanan’s peroration: as the US army in the riots of that year ‘took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country’. Trump’s speech was in the same key, but far more diffuse and less provocative. ‘We are one nation,’ he said, speaking of ...”

“... to his office. The only thing she could think of to say was: ‘I was not available.’ He took this as an admission she was having an affair and ‘positively beamed’ at her. She’s sure he’d have sacked her if she’d told him the truth. Afterwards, she felt the whips were looking at her ‘with new and comradely approval’. She wasn’t used ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... Neo-Latin odes of Casimir Sarbiewski, ‘the Polish Horace’.) University friends who married and took provincial livings sought to re-create a schooly companionship by exchanging odes. In reading these verses you are meant to fondle their metrical smoothness, smile wisely at an appropriate allusion to Virgil, smirk at a double entendre, or burst into ...”

“... by the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, the only African country to withstand the Scramble, the term took on a powerful political dimension. Ethiopian movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and John Chilembwe’s Nyasaland rising of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and ...”

“... principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the art. But Carlyle possessed one ...”