Search Results

“... from official in character. Roskill fought the censors of the Cabinet Office as resolutely as Sir Charles Webster did when writing his History of the Strategic Air Offensive. Roskill went on to write more personal books: three volumes on Hankey and as a final production a hilarious life of Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty. He also launched a sharp attack on ...”

“... to literary agents than that they are merely low and intrusive. In his Irving to Irving (1974), Charles Madison credits them with a major part of the responsibility for the present fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to ...”

“... sometimes with her mother or her sister, lived at a bewildering variety of addresses, consoled by hope. Humbert’s first book of poems, London Sonnets, was published in 1920, but he didn’t really make a stir until Requiem (1927), although Bagguley is surely wrong in saying that ‘no book of verse since Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy sold so ...”

“... most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles Unwin, a clerk at a detective agency, known only as ‘the Agency’, which occupies all 46 floors of the tallest building in an unnamed city that in some ways is quite like New York, only smaller (the Empire State Building has 102 storeys), and in other ...”

“... natural historical description and theological commentary. Some geologists, most notably Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830-33), played down the role of catastrophes in the Earth’s history, hoping ‘to free the science from Moses’ and other forms of what he condemned as imaginative excess. Reliance on smaller-scale changes, such as ...”

“... in her care.’ In other words, Restell was probably the best third party anyone in New York could hope for. For those who could pay her fees – the charge for a surgical abortion peaked at $200 – Restell had an unusual talent for extricating women safely from pregnancy (‘safe’ is a very relative term when it comes to Victorian obstetrics). The ...”

“... The first sentence of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is one of the most memorable openings in all literature: ‘After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow. From there he rang Akmatova every day, begging her to come.’ That was in 1934, and in his indispensable Mandelstam, Clarence Brown outlined the circumstances which led to this smack, whose sharp report not only unloosed the avalanche in which the poet Osip Mandelstam perished but also prepared the volcanic action which would begin thirty years later when his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam sat down to write her memoirs ...”

“... way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the hope of their being read has extended over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less ...”

“... for a dreamy sort of introspection: ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt the ...”

“... a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the learned obscurity of the schools: they would not go away, even when taken down. A parish divided on whether to bow to the altar was as hard to manage as a Parliament divided on whether to bow to the mace. The great strength of Dr Aston’s ...”

“... who have more recently thought about the matter (and who do not believe, as Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor now do, that in losing an encompassing faith we have lost all capacity to talk about the public good at all) agree that our own present sense of what, exactly, these two more lively kinds of argument for justice now are, and of how we might decide ...”

“... Soon after he began the novel, Lawrence told Barbara Low that it was already ‘beyond all hope of ever being published’. When it was published in England, in 1921, Martin Secker cut out several of the milder homoerotic passages still remaining. Lawrence had the Hobson’s choice of either censoring himself, or having Women in Love suppressed ...”

“... cheeks and eyes as bright   As sunlight on a stream;     Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. Wonderful lines, but do they actually refer to anyone specific? Part of their magic seems to depend on tantalising the reader with the tacit suggestion that they do. Emily Dickinson made quite a speciality of this, in lines which ...”

“... the gruesome possibility that the work won’t make it out alive. An aphorism on boredom might hope to escape the slow, dumb mumbling of its subject. But to carry off an entire volume devoted to a condition about as definite as a mud puddle in a flood – this feat requires extraordinary qualities, such as have preserved from fractious tears countless ...”

“... atomic physicist and engineer, at a moment when once again practical science seemed to offer the hope of either a bright or else a catastrophic future. He completed his doctoral thesis in the mid-Fifties on the interaction between science and the Industrial Revolution, focusing on the Lunar Society, the celebrated Midlands group of intellectuals and ...”