Search Results

“... on which he had embarked at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and to apply to study English at Balliol College, Oxford. This decisive shift of interest is subliminally traced in what ended up as the opening piece of Prince’s Collected, the early ‘An Epistle to a Patron’, a struggling architect’s bravura appeal for a commission, addressed ...”

“... it, but he seemed to have some sort of Anglo-Irish background. Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was ...”

“... Who can resist the appeal of the English country house? Publishers are well aware of their popularity – which is doubtless explained by snobbery and the antique trade as much as anything – so we have a constant stream of books on the subject as well as the phenomenon of those cognoscenti aptly characterised recently in the pages of Harpers and Queen as the ‘National Trust Navy ...”

“... about that attitude the freedom to talk about all manner of things under the guise of History or English. The lack of oversight, and of targets, must send a chill of horror through any modern manager of a school, and with some reason: it was pretty haphazard, and who was to say that only good teaching would or did come of the laissez-faire system? The line ...”

“... be icons if we knew nothing about the sitters. Even unforgettable photographs like the one Richard Avedon took of Pound in the late 1950s are attached to one time and place. The Lewis portraits represent the man rather than the man at a given moment. Eliot, hair neatly parted, three-piece grey suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, is the conservative ...”

“... that they were very interested in their history, but preferred it in the form of fiction. If one English reaction to his observation is likely to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced. Of the ‘facts’ of early English history which ...”

“... boxing was not too wicked really, Cobbett was assuring the masses that bull-baiting was a good old English sport, not to be banned by Methodists. Cobbett supported Roman Catholic emancipation with the argument that this was the old religion of the country, in better times, but he was venomous against the modern business practices of newfangled Quakers and ...”

“... even at times quite affecting. It has a large and not too narrow fan base; at least one serious English novelist is rumoured to have stayed at home to watch it rather than go to the TLS centenary party. PhDs are being written on it. Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’, edited by Roz Kaveney ...”

“... punctuation. Further errors were made in the printing-press. None of the compositors at Dijon knew English, except for the foreman, Maurice Hirchwald, who knew only enough to decide that he could correct Joyce’s vagaries. Joyce tried to undo some of this damage, but the job was too much for him. He corrected thousands of misprints on the galleys, but missed ...”

“... it has to be admitted that there is not much left of the carcase of Pirenne’s thesis. Yet, as Richard Hodges says, it obstinately refuses to disappear. If one reason for this is that economists never agree, another, as he also says, is that the very sparseness of the evidence leaves almost infinite room for argument: we have, for example, no early ...”

“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening years ...”

“... results that nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper all the rest. Visiting kings, like Richard and Philip II of France, bickered about precedence; the Christian nobility in Palestine fought each other for the increasingly enfeebled crown of Jerusalem; above all, Crusaders fresh from Europe, with all the bigoted ignorance of their modern successors ...”

“... Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career ...”

“... from an essay T.S. Eliot published in 1926, in which he ranked the sermons with ‘the finest English prose of their time, of any time’. Eliot’s essay marked the tercentenary of the death of a contemporary of Shakespeare, who between 1588 and his death had been successively or simultaneously vicar of St Giles Cripplegate; master of Pembroke ...”

“... gestus – constituted a double translation of the poetry, into the portable art of etching via an English version of the original Greek text. The Tate, which owns a set of the prints, says that Hockney found a copy of the poems in Bradford public library in 1960, but it doesn’t say who the translator was. Many contenders have tried to render Cavafy, but the ...”