Search Results

“... living on my nerves. I would wish the next days out of my life.’ The novel tells the story of Elizabeth Reegan, the second wife of a sergeant, who is slowly dying of cancer in a police barracks in the Irish midlands. It would not have been lost on McGahern’s father that the disease that killed John McGahern’s mother had been given to his ...”

“... Scott’s Woodstock. And this raises the possibility – very unlikely, I think – that Pound drew directly on Scott without needing Browning as intermediary. However, Pound was a very bookish poet, as Browning was also. In Browning’s case, the proclivity was inherited: for Browning’s father was a perhaps compulsive bibliophile. (And if this seems out ...”

“... an evaluation of its chances involves understanding the problems and aims of Cardinal Fleury and Elizabeth Farnese. Even though the exploration of English Jacobitism in this book is superficial, the European dimension makes it a great deal more than the exploration of an anachronistic quirk of Scottish history. It is natural that this book, while ostensibly ...”

“... or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe. The universal survey would become one of ...”

“... their calls for reform when they needed to sweeten their Presbyterian allies in Scotland, but drew back when moderate English opinion had to be conciliated. The ‘piety’ of ‘Warwick’s godly mafia’, an organisation which in one of Adamson’s eirenic moments is allowed to have been ‘first and foremost the outward expression’ of an ‘inward ...”

“... Futurist serate were particularly good news for fruit and vegetable vendors: the events drew audiences of three or four thousand, many of whom came armed with tomatoes, potatoes, oranges and eggs with which to pelt the merry pranksters. Marinetti evolved a Futurist style of declamation which seems to have been highly effective: the Futurist ...”

“... chronicles, both contemporary and written long afterwards. It is unclear how much the chroniclers drew on anything more than rumour and hearsay. Each had his own agenda. With the Capetians, there are few examples of triumphalist court-sponsored narratives such as those promoted by the early Carolingian rulers. Instead, the chroniclers offered idiosyncratic ...”

“... And the plays brought in a lot of money. ‘I had achieved what I wanted . . . Bernard Partridge drew a cartoon for Punch in which William Shakespeare was shown biting his fingers in front of the boards that advertised my plays.’ As a wit-about-town, Maugham had various dalliances with women. His lust for chaps was a fairly open secret in his circle – he ...”

“... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...”

“... they’re busy too.’ In those days, doctors-in-training and students, rather than phlebotomists, drew blood at night, with varying success (this at one of the best resourced hospitals in the world, and one of the oldest in the US). The resident stuck a needle in the crook of my arm and popped a glass tube into the plastic sleeve on the bevelled surface of ...”

“... to do with Simón. In effect, they become a couple who don’t have sex and aren’t sure what drew them together in the first place, semi-strangers linked only by a concern for their child’s welfare. So, apart from being, in some way, Joseph, Mary and Jesus, they might not be such an unusual type of family.Most of the time David, who was judged to be ...”

“... wish to part. In ‘The Fête’ – a poem Ezra Pound chose for the Egoist, and on which Knox drew for his parody (it begins: ‘To-night again the moon’s white mat/Stretches across the dormitory floor’) – a sixteen-year-old French boy recalls escaping from boarding school to go to the circus. ‘The black clown, with his dirty grin/ Lay, sprawling ...”

“... tend to take emphatic pride in their nation’s carriers: the Royal Navy refers to HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014, as ‘4.5 acres of floating sovereign power’. The US has eleven full-size fleet carriers, more than the rest of the world combined. It wasn’t always so. Japan had ten carriers by 1940 and Japanese admirals pioneered the carrier ...”

“... all the claptrap that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”