Search Results

“... but the characters in Poor Things are talking only about a single word in a well-known scene. A lady asks another character in the Wilde play about his family and he says he doesn’t know who he is by birth. ‘I was … well, found … in a handbag.’ The lady repeats part of the answer as a bewildered question (‘a ...”

“... of Catherine of Valois – wife of Henry V, disinterred during Henry VII’s rebuilding of the Lady Chapel. ‘I did kiss her mouth,’ he wrote in 1669. In 1806, having failed to ‘get’ Nelson after his death (he was buried in St Paul’s), the vergers had a wax effigy of him made and put it on show for sixpence a pop. Later, in 1843, Parliament had to ...”

“... proposal, and the following summer Augusta came to London in need of Byron’s financial help. Lady Oxford had recently ended her affair with the poet and returned to her husband, and Byron could not resist the ‘irreplaceable joy’ offered by his sister. In an account written after the marriage collapsed, Annabella claims that, within hours of their ...”

“... Barrett Browning had become a damsel famed in story. In 1934 Virginia Woolf observed that ‘“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is glanced at perhaps by two professors in American universities once a year; but we all know how Miss Barrett lay on her sofa; how she escaped from the dark house in Wimpole Street one September morning; how she met health and ...”

“... lover Teresa Guiccioli and her husband, and so on? Are we still interested in the tempests with Lady Caroline Lamb? It is all the worse realising that it will end with the expedition to join the Greek War of Independence, uncomfortably like the scheme of a fantasist. ‘Writing, even with genius, did not appear to him to fulfil a great man’s duty: it had ...”

“... still swells up, and up so big you’d never believe, it could be a football there in the leg. The lady kept at us, why don’t you see the doctor? Try everything. What harm can that possibly do? Made him sick – no way would he keep anything down – medicine killing him, we threw it all out. Never went back. No one’s come near till the police – God ...”

“... Essays and Commentaries. A coffee-table Book of Popular Betjeman Dogs and Horses, edited by Lady Penelope. An unofficial ‘pirated’ life of Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Organised Platypus Races in Australia. Most of these being explored at this very moment by John ...”

“... made up of a dentist’s chair, A store dummy, an electric hair-dryer, steak knives ... When a lady fainted seeing me in my underwear. Some nights, however, they opened a hundred doors, Always to a different room, and could not find me. There was only a short squeak now and then, As if a bird had been trapped out there in the dark. The Avenue of Earthly ...”

“... We are told the tale      of troubled Mæðhilde, Geat’s much-loved      lovesick lady; disturbing dreams      dispossessed her of sleep. As that passed over      may this pass also. For thirty long winters      the warlord Đeodric held the fort of the Mærings,      his fame known to many. As that passed over ...”

“... Lark, My Antonia and One of Ours) in passing, as she does the subsequent démeublé novels A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy; she mentions The Professor’s House, arguably Cather’s finest work, only when it provides evidence for her theses. We do not see Cather at work on these books. When we last see her she is ‘drawing upon her, own ...”

“... reason to believe that the Government’s policies are benign in inspiration. Rather the reverse. Lady Thatcher as prime minister was entirely open in her determination to destroy those quasi-constitutional conventions of British political life which underlay the hated ‘consensus’ and the country’s decline. Moreover, the language of a bastard ...”

“... the advances of girls who pursued him into mildly romantic friendship. A particularly relentless lady, Lydia Avilova, was pacified by being put to work hunting up the early stories through old newspapers and magazines, so that they could be assembled for a collected edition. Chekovian things from his own plays or stories were apt to happen to Chekhov. I ...”

“... social dimension. It is a curious thought that one of the most famous of all, Chekhov’s ‘Lady with the Dog’ could only have taken place as it did where it did, although it seems universal in what it tells and means. Yet Gurov and the lady would have had no story at another time and in another country. The same ...”

“... In 1916, D.H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith of his abiding ‘sadness’: ‘for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing’. Driving to Garsington, Ottoline Morrell’s country seat, he was overwhelmed with a sense of so much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming ...”

“... part of it at Cambridge, had experienced a romantic tragedy and also a brief affair with Lady Caroline Lamb; and at 29 had already published several novels. The idea of writing about Pompeii had been suggested to him by a picture he had seen in the Brera at Milan. Till now the picture’s identity has remained unknown, but my colleague Robert ...”