Search Results

“... Old Man to be, cannot be answered without drawing on a mass of poems and plays. The same could be said for the destructive passion that Yeats came to regard as integral to old age. Almost despite its detail, The Arch-Poet keeps showing how creative Yeats found the synergy between ageing and hatred. He had been imagining what it would mean to be old since he ...”

“... turned empty phrases inside out. The goat-like satyr on the front cover of Die Fackel suggests, as Edward Timms says, ‘that for the Kraus of the 1890s satire was a vaguely defined primitive force disrupting the civilities of a philistine society.’ But as the political situation worsened, Kraus embarked on the graver, more apocalyptic project of seeing the ...”

“... That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June 1949,                           for ever and everPlum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall coversThe cries of the whipped and the sighs of the loversAnd the hard bright light composesA meaningless moment into an eternal factWhich a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must ...”

“... Looking down rather reprovingly from the shelf opposite are the three large volumes of Edward Nehls’s Composite Biography, a version or two of Harry T. Moore’s frequently revised biography, the first and so far the only volume of the three-tier Cambridge biography, and the ample lifework of Emile Delavenay. There are more beside them, and more to come: Rosie Jackson says there are ten in progress ...”

“... did not gain a decisive momentum in literature until the end of the 18th century. Coleridge said that what he had most admired about Wordsworth’s early poems was their ‘original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents and situations’. Empson thought that too much ...”

“... names of other letter-writers already enshrined in volume form – Carlyle, whom Lytton Strachey said was ‘too long’, and Swift, whom the same authority qualified, with characteristic wrong-headedness one may think, or indeed impertinence, as ‘too dry’. These two are going to be amusing. It is hard to avoid the impression that they are not so much ...”

“... endless discontent; with remorse, thrown in, for the massacre of so many good intentions.’ To Edward Garnett, 29 March 1898: ‘I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I ...”

“... allusion to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, lacking the alliterative euphony of the original. What Edward Pearce of the Guardian offers is a record of his 19 days on the road during the General Election, visiting as many constituencies, each time in the company of a particular candidate, of varying party. There are glimpses of the circumstances of its ...”

“... German peasant woman ambling towards us with a very white face. My mate Fergus sniggered. He said she had funny wee shoes and legs. I have a feeling she may not remember how the conversation went, but I recorded it for posterity in the back of a school jotter the next day. The Queen: ‘Very hot, isn’t it?’ Fergus: ‘Roastin’.’ The Queen: ‘And ...”

“... esteemed royal generation in recent history. Think of the Prince of Wales who eventually became Edward VII: he, too, enjoyed the gaming tables, was a serial and incorrigible adulterer, and found his friends among the fast set, whose morals were as loose as his own. Think of the Prince of Wales who briefly became ...”

“... points south as places of leisure and relaxation which for fifty weeks of the year can scarcely be said to exist at all. According to this view, the poetry associated with Mediterranean and Caribbean countries must always be off the literary map: one can expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (...”

“... that he did not rearm because he would have lost the 1935 General Election. 3. Ernest Bevin said of the Labour Party’s relations with the Soviet Union: ‘Left can speak to Left.’ 4. Nye Bevan called Hugh Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime ...”

“... cast light on civilisation by comparing what happens when blood is sold and when it is donated. Edward Bristow’s subject, likewise, is a service which may be either donated or traded – or obtained under duress. His exploration of it takes him into unfamiliar recesses of public and private depravity, and shines a torch into the laundry room of ...”

“... Rebecca West said that Olive Schreiner was a ‘geographical fact’. Others were reminded of a natural force, admired and dreaded, unchecked by illness, war or poverty, something new coming out of Africa. To fit her into the history of South Africa, of literature or of women’s movements is an exhausting business ...”

“... the Majestic as the fiancé of Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of the hotel’s widowed owner, Edward. The Major’s relationship with Angela is largely epistolary – he has dim memories of kissing her in Brighton while on leave, and of afterwards steadying himself on a cactus, ‘which had rendered many of his parting words insincere’ – and though he ...”