Search Results

“... golden in the sun.’ Park Hill, designed by the Smithson-influenced architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, is now the largest listed building in Europe, and as he trolls about the Sheffield streets Hatherley is struck again and again by the ‘sublime scale’ of this humungous housing development and the way the stepped blocks slip-slide away over the contours ...”

“... does not cite Mead on this useful point. She tries to recruit help further afield, from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The name of Smith is cunningly brought in, and will tease the amour-propre of the rat scholars, but there is more wit than sense in the choice. Smith’s ...”

“... words actually came from a white interpreter of ‘considerable literary skill’ called Henry Smith. Coates has not proved that the famous words were not at least the gist of the speech in question, however; nor has he proved that America before the white invasion was totally unable to offer incomers the look and feel and smell of the unspoiled wild. The ...”

“... Lord Palmerston addressing similar words of comfort to a poacher en route to the gallows. Charles Smith, convicted of wounding (but not killing) one of his lordship’s keepers, did not die for England, but to uphold the sanctity of England’s game laws. His trial, in 1822, is minutely examined by Harry Hopkins in The Long Affray, a masterly account of the ...”

“... verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in that hugely influential ...”

“... The idea of Indians as savvy negotiators is hardly new: this was the central argument of Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), which numerous subsequent books have been influenced by. Recent scholarship makes clear that to avoid constant warfare and ensure legally valid titles and an orderly distribution of land among settlers, the English ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... to Inglis because the family had already given his papers to the Welsh historian, Dai Smith), or the records of the organisations in which he worked – John McIlroy, in his fine study of Williams in adult education, the basis of Inglis’s Chapters 6 and 7, though he contrives not to mention it in his acknowledgments, draws liberally on the ...”

“... and poor at sums. He gives the age of Olivier, born in 1907, as 39 when he achieved his triumph as Richard III in 1944. Tarquin Olivier, born in 1936, is credited with a visit at the age of seven to Notley Abbey, bought by his father in 1945. Nor has Holden checked all the stories he takes over from previous biographers. Like most of them, he tells how Olivier ...”

“... 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast ...”

“... Palgrave in Suffolk. She was a celebrity – Wedgwood produced a cameo of her, and she appeared in Richard Samuel’s painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain at the Royal Academy in 1779 – but involved herself in the obscure business of schooling with characteristic energy and intelligence: she liked the boys and did not sentimentalise them, and she ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... Spadafora’s Scots are well known, almost to the point of ennui: Ferguson, Millar, Hume, Smith, Robertson. But his five Englishmen (who actually include two Welshmen) are not all equally famous. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon ...”

“... is selling out, and who, if anyone, is claiming too much. A beautiful little book by John Maynard Smith, Shaping Life: Genes, Embryos and Evolution (1998), part of a series entitled ‘Darwinism Today’, explains the present state of the reductionist project in the context of the astounding development from fertilised egg to adult organism, and observes ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”