Search Results

“... so that we saw the great mass of upturned faces at one moment and at the next were peering through Lady Diana’s veil. Was she nervous today? Might we see a tear? Does the camera extend our perception? Or does it, by seeing what our naked eye can never see, confuse our relationship with the thing we look at? Is it the camera or our own fantasies about royalty ...”

“... in posies for readers to sniff and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful ...”

“... thirteenth century. This puts a new complexion on the fairy: not the misty bath-look of a country lady mysteriously slim, but the pale brown of a mysteriously plump, veiled woman of Damascus, in perpetual afternoon sewing, secluded from the dusty city. We wonder how her needlework found its way to this wall. In the coarse hands of some crusader? Did he come ...”

“... this seriously. I am always taking it seriously out to the wheelie bin and dropping in the white lady in the grey underhose who as we speak is speeding southwards in a sealed railway compartment. Perhaps that is poetry? No, it’s love. Can you recall why you began to write? I was locked in a toilet with a jackdaw and a notebook and my mother was pounding on ...”

“... says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ‘we’ had when young. But then their youth in this sense goes back a while, at least to the 18th century, as Foster ...”

“... but explicit and cynical, and went on about how he would have been ashamed to leave a young lady in the virgin state he found her; and instead of the magic of those ages long ago in which his lovers fled away into the storm, he announced that in the concluding lines of the poem he wished to ‘leave on the reader a sense of pettish ...”

“... his ‘saving grace of coarseness’ by introducing female characters who bend or break the rules (Lady Mason in Orley Farm, Lady Glencora in the Palliser sequence, Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds, Mrs Hurtle in The Way We Live Now), and male ones who enjoy gambling or field sports and whose talk is ribald, even lewd ...”

“... background and way of life as it is possible to be. The first of the authors is a solemn, Jewish lady-lawyer; the second an irascible Red Army general; the third (until his death recently in a car crash) was a contumacious bohemian of vagrant habits and wide-ranging intellectual interests. One of the many things that make their books so depressing to ...”

“... War. And of course there are girls everywhere. Last time I dined in Magdalen I sat next to a young lady who presented herself to me as a Fellow of the College. I said to her: ‘I hope you realise that it is thanks to me you are here. It was I who proposed the emancipating amendment to the College Statutes in 1976.’ She was most surprised and said: ‘Do you ...”

“... propagated by ignorant publicists, that the King was prevented by his government from marrying the lady because she was an American. The Government, the Church of England and most public opinion objected to the match because at the time Mrs Simpson had two lawful husbands living. The King did not want to see this unwelcome fact, so, true to form, he did not ...”

“... story of his work at New Delhi is in part one of frustration. He could treat the Viceroy and his lady, and even the King, as distinguished private clients, but the job was not his alone and the decisions were in some degree collective ones. Sir Herbert Baker, who was responsible for the Secretariat buildings, and always had a book of poetry rather than a ...”

“... on literary and social themes, The Sign of the Fish. Many of his portraits are of the beau monde: Lady Cunard and Nancy, Lord Berners, the Duff Coopers, Mrs Fleming and her successive husbands Lord Rothermere and Ian Fleming (who ‘good-naturedly accepted me, no doubt because I was neither a wild bohemian nor a rampant homosexual’). Much of this is ground ...”

“... a strange experience in the woods. Half-English Léonie enjoys the first sighting of a heavenly lady (a pretty swarthy lady, in this instance), but it isn’t long before Léonie’s apparition is appropriated by Thérèse and kitted out with orthodox, Lourdes-type accoutrements. (It isn’t Bernadette, though, who’s ...”

“... the timing of its publication – between the scandals of Ulysses in 1922 and the appearance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness in 1928 – meant that My First Thirty Years inevitably attracted the attention of censors in Britain and America. In November 1925 Janet Flanner’s Paris dispatch for the New Yorker discussed the brouhaha ...”

“... used to make a social point. In Bodley 764, a carefully rendered goshawk sits on the arm of a lady, possibly the manuscript’s patroness, Cecily d’Aubigny, while in the background a peasant scares birds into flight. The text tells us that ‘hawks are usually carried on the left hand [which] represents temporal things, the right everything that is ...”