Search Results

“... before Charles’s reign, by a client of Burghley under Elizabeth and by the Earl of Exeter under James. They were advocated by such ‘apolitical’ writers as Camden. During the 1630s the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme of all ...”

“... a week goes by without the enemies of official secrecy having good cause to sing the praises of James Rusbridger. From his Cornish retreat he sprays the correspondence columns of newspapers with volleys of good sense and good humour. This bluff, meticulous man spent much of his youth as a British businessman in Europe, where he worked in a dilatory sort of ...”

“... men breathe.’ The cultural revolutionary celebrated here (unlikely as it must now seem) is Sir James Frazer, extravagantly written up over half a page in the News Chronicle of 27 January 1937. The article – under the title ‘He discovered why you believe what you do’ – certainly does not stint its praises of the grand old man, then in his ...”

“... There were hundreds of similar stories.Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in the Tower of London and heavily fined. By 1660 he was in his mid-seventies and the years and defeats had taken their toll. When it was time to read the proclamation, his voice was ...”

“... I’s personal rule in 1640, when financial collapse and military defeat by the Scots drove the king to call the Parliament that would destroy him, and the year of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (though whereas Trevor-Roper’s narrative went beyond the beginning of the war in August, Adamson’s halts with the ...”

“... Am I eccentric?’ Edward James once asked me in the days before I was added to his long list of enemies both real and imaginary. ‘I suppose I am, but I don’t mean to be. I’ve always tried to behave like everyone else.’ We were sitting on the platform of one of the inevitably incomplete concrete follies he was building at enormous expense on a hillside he owned by proxy in a Mexican jungle ...”

“... target was Burke as the author of Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), an attack on the King, or at any rate on the Palace, as seeking to influence, to frustrate and to corrupt Parliament through a cabal of secret and confidential advisers. This was an old charge with a complicated history: it owed something to Bolingbroke, whom Burke very ...”

“... which ended under Richard Nixon, began under Woodrow Wilson. That Hoover persecuted Martin Luther King is notorious, but Hoover was also the man who drove Marcus Garvey out of America. Similarly, the Hoover who turned his malign attention upon the anti-Vietnam War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed ...”

“... rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of T.E. Lawrence, Beaverbrook and Mackenzie King, and the villain in lachrymose ‘decline of Britain’ books and television series. I think by the end of the Seventies only the Hannay books and one or two others were still in print. The charges against John Buchan were either false (as with ...”

“... on the Rosetta Stone in some way stood for Ptolemy (V); the Greek inscription celebrated the boy-king’s accession and offered him special honours in Egyptian temples on the anniversary of his coronation and his birth. The recumbent lion ? was the fourth sign in the hieroglyphic inscription corresponding to Ptolemaios and the second character in the name ...”

“... of his life. Jack Yeats had ambitions as a writer, too. He wrote miniature plays, starting with James Flaunty, or the Terror of the Western Seas in 1901. And novels, of which The Amaranthers (1936) is the best. But it is hard to see how Robin Skelton’s claim for JBY as a writer could be sustained. When the whole of his writing becomes available, Skelton ...”

“... sanctuary spaces ceased to be available. Still, the tradition of legal sanctuary clung on until James I finally ended it in 1623. A decade later, John Ford used sanctuary as a plot device in his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but ...”

“... James Woodforde’s diary retains its lumbering, unremitting interest. The obvious question is: what made him keep it? To tell us about his times, or to tell his page about himself? These are the reasons why most men keep diaries, but neither was the compulsion behind this one. This is perhaps why, with this latest edition of Parson Woodforde, we push along beside a writer who, one imagines, would not have cared to be designated social historian or confessional writer, but who nevertheless, deliberately or artlessly, reveals himself and his age with a starkness akin to the hard Norfolk light falling on a ditch ...”

“... of time!”.’ Bayley distinguished between those writers – he had Virginia Woolf and Henry James in mind – upon whom ‘a passionate and omnivorous interest in life’ is laid as a sacred duty, and other writers – Tolstoy and Jane Austen sustained this quality – who are too far inside life to find it ‘interesting’. The art of Tolstoy and Jane ...”