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“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... things do not change significantly: the servants are in a state of permanent revolution; when the cook leaves, Grandma cooks (appallingly) and her grandfather goes off to an hotel. At first, the young orphan is intimidated and submissive to her new role, her only reaction a series of psychosomatic illnesses. Gradually, though, she realises the absurdity and ...”

“... In a cannibal society it may be in a position to explain to the eccentric who declines to kill and cook his fellows that his squeamishness is a reaction formation against his fiercer than average impulses, but it cannot in itself pronounce on or relieve him of the responsibility of deciding about the moral standing of cannibalism. Freud cast more illuminating ...”

“... that Dad would see the irony of warning me against unmasculine behaviour while expecting me to cook and serve his meals. He liked to be waited on, even in small matters like the clicking of tiny saccharine pellets from a dispenser into his tea. In any case, kitchen tasks would demand energy that should be devoted to preparing his case. This was a lawyer ...”

“... last travelling Highland dance teachers’. Eventually, Henderson’s mother took a position as a cook-housekeeper in a large house near Yeovil: a part of Somerset still rich in traditional song. She managed to send Hamish to board at a small prep school on the coast near Teignmouth, where he impressed the headmaster, who became his guardian after his mother ...”

“... a moccasin snake with her riding crop). The Langhorne family’s meals were prepared by a Negro cook and butler. ‘Don’t kill him, Dab,’ Nancy’s mother cajoled, to save the butler from an act of violence when he tripped one day while carrying a tureen of oyster stew. Chillie never lost his prejudice against the Damyankees or his conviction that work ...”

“... without any passport or visa checks. One hundred and thirty chefs had been flown in from India to cook ‘strictly vegetarian’ Chinese, Greek, Italian, Indian, Mexican, South African and Thai food. Personal servants were allocated to the most important guests. South African attendees included President Zuma’s daughter Duduzile, his son Duduzane ...”

“... tally with feminism. Her fictional women compete for male attention; they type men’s theses and cook their dinners. There is no challenge to male power in the novels (and indeed why should there be?).In ‘the brutal 1960s’, as Bob Smith called them, Pym’s letters slide towards predictable Tory attitudes – disparagement of the welfare state, of ...”

“... family. His father was a prosperous solicitor, and the substantial family home was serviced by a cook, a gardener and a live-in maid. One of Hill’s college friends who visited in the mid-1930s recalled a ‘magnificent residence’, the grounds of which included a river and a tennis court: ‘A servant brought us lunch at a table on the ...”

“... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...”

“... and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care. When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his ...”

“... a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the boys wanting to go to Cambridge ...”

“... sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... fat, alcoholic, suicidal’, Agee sought protection by agreeing to become a full-time cook for Newton and Moses. Newton, now 77, soon asked her for a ‘date’, and she duly became his mistress, leaving Sprecher – who was Newton’s patient – no choice but to surrender or lose contact with his child (he surrendered).In 1985 a group member ...”