Search Results

“... a tougher task than any of the other authors in this sample. He is writing the latest volume in Edward Arnold’s ‘New History of England’, and is faced with the alarming task of imposing balance and order on a field like Matthew Arnold’s two Hinkseys, in which nothing stays the same. Professor Hirst has for some time cast himself as the advocate of ...”

“... Edington. The second covers the rest of Alfred’s reign and takes us on into the reign of his son Edward. The third covers the reign of Alfred’s grandson Athelstan the Victorious, and his successors Kings Edmund and Eadred. The suitably dramatic terminal event is the killing of the Norwegian Eirik Bloodaxe, briefly king of York, at Stainmore in the Pennines ...”

“... did Cromwell think any better of the Petition of Right, the reprise of Magna Carta designed by Sir Edward Coke to recall Charles I to his constitutional duty: according to Coke’s grandson Roger, he called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can find scant mention of this menacing language and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for ...”

“... less claustrophobic. From the point in the story where Emily and Louisa (who married Tom Conolly, said to be the richest man in Ireland) settled in their new homes, Carton and Castletown respectively, we get reports of everything that went on in these two houses and their parks. Nearly twenty pages are given up to what, in content, could be a talk to the ...”

“... may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled by the real proprietors of said land to do competent work for his living. And who are these ‘real proprietors’? ‘The Saxon British.’ It was ‘heroic White men’ who turned the ‘oozy jungle’ into fertile plantations for ‘idle Black men’ to neglect. ‘Banish all White men ...”

“... who took her provincial style in hand and then left her, to Oxford, to Aldermaston, and via Edward and Dorothy Thompson, to the watering hole of the New Left at the Partisan in Carlisle Street in Soho. It’s a fair geography of the early 1960s. People had begun wandering about, and unless you stayed put, you were bound to meet them. They were delighted ...”

“... of him?’ Carrère asks himself, or the reader, before whisking us back to the early 1980s, when Edward Limonov – Ukrainian émigré poet, recently down and out in New York – arrives in Paris, ‘crowned by the success of his scandalous novel, It’s Me, Eddie’. Limonov is a comet blazing across the local literary cosmos ‘where I’, Carrère tells ...”

“... ache to the sharp pain. ‘You get used to it and you realise it’s just a performance,’ she said. ‘Final warning! How many final warnings have I had? A million.’ According to the money education charity Credit Action, the average British household is £8000 in debt, not including mortgages. The banks may lose out when a borrower goes bust, but they ...”

“... Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some misgivings. ‘The subject of the book,’ he said, ‘is political, though it is hard to tell whether the author’s sympathies are ...”

“... gave him credit for. At the heart​ of this dispute was the problem of violence. Much has been said about why Sartre – or Jeanson, or Alleg – could countenance it, while Camus found it repellent. In the 1940s he had excused violence as a grim French necessity in the face of defeat and occupation; it was not the servant of a grand idea. Yet in the ...”

“... one of themselves. But Sonnet 20 proves conclusively that he was sexually normal.’ Hallet Smith said of Sonnet 20: ‘The attitude of the poet toward the friend is one of love and admiration, deference and possessiveness, but it is not at all a sexual passion’; Robert Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active ...”

“... They lived for a time in adjacent lodgings. For a week they subsisted on cheese and apples, till Edward, the older man, unexpectedly got a cheque for £25. They had a good meal in a Soho restaurant, crossed the street and sat down to another. Half a bottle of wine could then be had for tenpence. They went on to port in a friend’s room. When they got back ...”

“... England in disgrace. He was subsequently imprisoned and executed for having quartered the arms of Edward the Confessor with his own (something he was almost certainly entitled to do, so long as the arms carried ‘three labels silver’ to distinguish them from those of the heir to the throne). This was taken to imply a treasonable aspiration to the ...”

“... saying, even as he is left wondering about what these other things are that are not quite being said. Frost may have confessed to cutting up the snake, but he wasn’t about to dissect his own life. In this superb first volume of the Letters (two more are on the way) he doesn’t mention many of the crises that shadowed his early years. There are no ...”

“... or even a street after her: but again, those three syllables defeated too many people. Her nephew Edward Wollstonecraft, an undistinguished and illiberal businessman who emigrated to New South Wales, had a whole district of Sydney named after him, and Australians don’t seem to find it difficult to pronounce: so why do we have so much trouble with his ...”