Search Results

“... fifty yards to safety, or alternatively that he was buried by the explosion three days before he rose again. Though for very good reasons he wore a uniform to suggest that he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”

“... the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of ...”

“... from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fé. I had already told my mother, not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when looking back at the past, though ‘pink cataracts’ might be the more accurate phrase. Researchers have found ways of correlating people’s wishful impressions with hard data, checking the age at which children learned ...”

“... Ranelagh, by the Chelsea Hospital, had to be protected by a dedicated Bow Street patrol. Felonies rose by 50 per cent, and now that felons could no longer be shipped to America, more and more of them had to be hanged. John Townsend, taken on as a runner at this time, later looked back nostalgically to this time, when ‘we never had an execution wherein we ...”

“... soon as dinner was despatched,’ he wrote of his teenage years, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, I drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’ Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer ...”

“... sewage, the prime minister, Brian Faulkner, resigned with the executive on 28 May 1974. Trimble rose in the Unionist Party, and in 1990 was elected to the House of Commons. He was pro-Europe and was less committed to capital punishment than most Unionist MPs. Though he was the party’s youngest and most junior MP, he was already acquiring respect both as ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”

“... chemical nature of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... reformers. On his last day in court, just before his death sentence was delivered, Thistlewood rose to some eloquence (though he started quaveringly, being an awkward and rather timorous speaker):A few hours hence, and I will be no more, but the nightly breeze, which will whistle over the silent grave that shall protect me from its keenness, will bear to ...”

“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”