Search Results

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to ...”

“... travels along paths ‘strewd with Rubies thicke as gravell’ to arrive at ‘Heavens bribeles hall/ Where noe corrupted voyces braule’. Ralegh’s ‘Nymph’s Reply’ to Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ combines imaginative description of delicate beauties with destruction and loss: Thie belt of strawe, and bedds of roses, Thie ...”

“... piles, pox and plague. Harington’s great innovation in domestic hygiene was so successful that James I is supposed to have brought him in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court. Harington was much more than a hygienist, however. Indeed, most of his works try to achieve rather too much at once. The Metamorphosis of Ajax ...”

“... to a plan which has been turned through 45 degrees – became fashionable. Some architects (James Sterling, for example) presented schemes using axonometrics which complicate things further by showing structures from below. Post-Modernism has changed all that and perspectives are once again respectable. Paintings, rather in the manner of Canaletto, by ...”

“... his memorial plaque, but Carn has lost its railway and might have sunk into dereliction had not James Cooney returned to his native place in the Fifties, to revive its fortunes with a meat-processing plant, a dance hall and a select tavern-cum-roadhouse. Thereafter Carn has done well enough. The lawn-mowers whirr ...”

“... journalist started after college in Pittsburgh. From its theatres, opera house and concert hall, she sent sharp, highly critical reviews to Nebraska papers. She formed a new attachment to Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a Pittsburgh judge in whose house she resided during the next five years while she taught English to high-school ...”

“... Artist Waiting in a Country House’, a sophisticated meditative poem to be read alongside James Fenton’s ‘A Vacant Possession’. The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament two years later set the tone for another politically conscious and responsible collection. The poem ‘returns’ to a photograph taken of the men of St Kilda in 1879, fifty ...”

“... University Library (and in a 1973 facsimile, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli). According to James West, editor of Trimalchio, the typescript of 27 October constitutes a completed version: ‘Naturally he expected to see proofs, and surely he planned to do some revising on them, but there is no evidence that, on 27 October, he contemplated major ...”

“... with Waggoners, with sun and moon on either side, which provoked Turner, was sold from Houghton Hall to Catherine the Great in Turner’s lifetime, but he could only have known it from a print. Lisa Vergara is particularly good on these binary compositions, which offer symbolic antitheses, and also symbolic continuities – majestic lateral progressions ...”

“... in England among the fenlands and in the marshy ground of the Thames Valley, it claimed both James I and Oliver Cromwell. Theories about its origin have been legion: in the Middle Ages it was thought to be due to the action of planets and comets, to electrical storms or rains of ‘fever poison’; the Chinese thought it was caused by disharmony between ...”

“... he is read on a different scale from most of his contemporaries; McEwan is fond of quoting Henry James to the effect that the only obligation of a novel ‘is that it be interesting’. Yet you only have to think of James to realise that there are many more subtle, and perhaps more rewarding, ways of being ...”

“... arm. When he turned up in his not quite matching brown corduroy suit to the matriculation tea in hall, some took him to be a gardener who had wandered in to pick up a sandwich or two. We, his students, also wore our shirts open, with collars turned up. I sometimes still do. Twice a week I attended seminars which he delivered in his very imitable sardonic ...”

“... and too nobbly for a girl’s. He/she has also attracted the attention of someone in the snooker hall above the pub and there’s a lot of shouting. Later, as we are getting into the car, Gary, a young man crippled with arthritis, calls out to A. from the snooker hall. She knows him and asks if it was him that was doing ...”

“... by the primitive slapstick of 1914-15. Chaplin owed much to Fred Karno and the English Music Hall tradition – an area which film historians are usually ignorant about, and which they hastily sidestep. It is, however, an area in which Robinson is an expert, and the relationship with Karno, and the story of Chaplin’s stage career, is given an ...”