Search Results

“... The work ‘fuck’ and its derivatives were timidly admitted into English fiction after the Lady Chatterley trial. Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch are said to have steeled themselves and forced the f-words into their prose. At first they fairly leaped off the page, but forty-odd years later they have settled in and may occur in almost any work of ...”

“... to say, very little idea of what it might be like working on a chain gang). In 1934 he married Lady Violet Pakenham. Alas, as with Maud, you don’t get much of a sense of Lady Violet from Barber, who fancies himself as rather droll (he is the author also of a witty biography of Simon Raven), and his endearing, if ...”

“... he had identified becoming a parody of itself. In May 1917 Sassoon goes to stay with Lord and Lady Brassey. Lord Brassey is ‘a pattern Englishman, no doubt, very wise in the ways of his generation, a useful servant of the State, but a strange figure to Youth in Revolt, and Youth torn by sacrifice. His wisdom has had its day ... Death presses him ...”

“... suddenly the man burst into flames ... The table rose from the floor before my very eyes ... The lady went into a trance and found herself reliving her earlier life as a servant to the King of France ... The spoon bent without the boy so much as touching it ...’ etc. Next comes the liberal-minded physicist who on the face of it appears quite willing to ...”

“... is concerned is shown by novels as different as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Portrait of a Lady. The ‘puzzle’ in the former concerns, for Sutherland, the question of whether Alec D’Urberville is to be regarded technically as a rapist. Was Tess raped, or was she seduced? Sutherland, taking this as an important legal question, inclines to the view ...”

“... Russell. There is a couple who lived for a year in a cave in Central Park; Jane Barnell, a lady with a beard 13½ inches long; the nine-year-old child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler, who reads Plutarch, plays poker, and has composed more than sixty pieces for the piano; and Commodore Dutch, ‘a brassy little man who has made a living for the last ...”

“... on skipping, When with his royal shipping The narrow seas are shady, And Charles brings home the lady. ‘Sure up’/‘Europe’ is a hiccuping drunken rhyme so bad as to acknowledge that the reality is likely to be harder to achieve than it sounds. Jonson is careful to separate slightly events in the Palatinate from those in Spain: skipping (prompted no ...”

“... The Female Detective, a collection of stories, came soon afterwards in 1864, and Revelations of a Lady Detective the same year; all were serialised. The Notting Hill Mystery is presented as a dossier of evidence collected by an insurance agent, Ralph Henderson, investigating the mysterious death of a woman whose husband had taken out five life insurance ...”

“... teach him useful things. Before long, he’s involved in an affair with a married Englishwoman, Lady Dudley. She is as passionate and transgressive as Madame de Mortsauf is chaste and sober. Lady Dudley is one of Balzac’s more enjoyable rakes, reminiscent of Byron’s ‘frolic grace’, ...”

“... no man can work.’ Good works in this general sense could be performed by an invalid Evangelical lady, flat on her back but radiating piety. There has, however, been a strong tendency in the Evangelical tradition to conflate good works with labour. A famous instance is found in Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs of 1720, written prior to the Evangelical Movement ...”

“... intrusions of human presence in swathed columns of drapery and colour. In the stunning picture of Lady Meux – born Susan Langdon, the mistress of a corporal in the Life Guards before she married a brewing heir – with black ground, black gown, black gloves, white furs, Lady Meux is more of a tidy little mannequin than a ...”

“... victims enjoying rape or being humiliated in court. Jestbook assumptions are central to works like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Virtue in Danger’, a sarcastic ballad on a real-life society case of 1721, and to the startling premise of Eliza Haywood’s novel of 1727, The Lucky Rape. Decades later more decorous women writers were still using the basic ...”

“... just out of reach. Over house-roofs: sullen hills, the firth drained down to sandbanks: the Reckit Lady, the Shair as Daith. I lay to sleep, with by my side neither man nor child; but a lichened branch that wound through the wooden chamber, pulling it close. It seemed a complicity like our own, when arm in arm on the city street, we bemoan our families, our ...”

“... of Victorian stage-Irishness as a literary mode, but also their glorified replacement, once Yeats, Lady Gregory and the rest of them got going on the campaign to add dignity to Ireland. ‘The looking-glass, cracked, does not tell the truth’ – and the resulting distortions are, in a sense, John Wilson Foster’s subject in his impressive new scrutiny of ...”