Search Results

“... translation it could almost be the beginning of an 18th-century epistolary novel; even more so in William Melmoth’s version from 1746: ‘I propose pursuing the remainder of my journey to the province partly in light vessels, and partly in post-chaises.’) Pliny didn’t collect and arrange the 121 letters in Book Ten himself: his audience is not posterity ...”

“... how accurate he believes early prescriptions were) and that not too many heirs followed Mrs Holman Hunt, who changed the concave lenses of her husband’s spectacles for convex ones to conceal his myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck ...”

“... years. But Honigmann has now revived, and extended, a theory that had seemed exploded: that the ‘William Shakeshafte’ who appears in the will of Alexander Hoghton, a Lancashire landowner, in 1581 was the young dramatist. The major new fact with which Honigmann backs up the theory is that John Cottom, who was for a time a schoolmaster at Stratford, appears ...”

“... on the grounds that they were ‘slummy’. O’Brian became an ardent follower of the local hunt, but didn’t get much writing done and seems to have come close to having a breakdown. In 1949 he and Mary moved abruptly to Collioure, where he began to write, and she to type, with astonishing tenacity, and he was able to rig up a self in which ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... cities, power plants and oil installations.Kaplan was responsible for raising the reputation of William Kaufmann, a civilian nuclear strategist and critic of massive retaliation. Another RAND corporation man and an influential adviser to the Department of Defence on nuclear matters, Kaufmann argued that threatening to respond to minor aggression with total ...”

“... like the bridegroom victimised by the succuba in “Ode”.’ We are a long way from the dogged hunt for allusions to grail myths and fertility rituals of earlier generations of Eliot scholars. Miller attempts no such theoretical arabesques. He is more like a McCarthy-inspired gumshoe than a queer theory exegete. He just wants to persuade his readers that ...”

“... Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to ...”

“... Britten only managed, at best, three. He often went to sleep with a score by his pillow. It was a hunt for only one prey, a journey of monotonous distinction, which never really widened. Throughout these biographies, and notwithstanding Britten’s splendid ear for verse, one has little sense of the composer taking much interest in any art but music.Britten ...”

“... where, after some rummaging (there are not even any running heads with page numbers to make the hunt easier), we find the note: ‘William Wordsworth (1770-1850), poet laureate from 1843’. It is almost impossible to reconstruct the conception of readers and their needs that can have led to the insertion of these ...”

“... and ossified that it required six generations of nobility to be allowed to follow the king’s hunt. A petition to be received at Versailles was turned down on the grounds that a member of the vicomte’s family had been found to have usurped their title in 1667.Joséphine, too, was rebuffed in her early attempts to restyle herself for life in Paris. The ...”

“... spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the bridge, an arch with a ...”

“... a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe went to Mount Rainier to do some birdwatching. He never returned. The most likely explanation is that ...”

“... than lessened by the connoisseur’s deadpan delivery. To envisage himself as an artist in the hunt for ‘any exceptionally nice little nudity … who is willing to be victimised for my benefit’ is to be laughingly self-aware about the strangeness of his own obsessions without quite laughing them off. Nabokov gets close to the mesmerising, disturbing ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”