Search Results

“... leaves us hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience in her that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough.’ He alluded sarcastically to ‘the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of magazines, who have found their “dear”, our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane so ...”

“... each night, Back in Nagasaki where the fellows chew tobaccy, And the women wicky-wacky woo! And Laura Nyro. ‘I know her. I forget her name. She’s dead, right?’ ‘You don’t know shit,’ the Maestro snarled. He was rendering me a service that, nowadays, in the absence of my mother and father, a number of my close friends feel obliged to ...”

“... the title Channon had longed for.)For Channon, the House of Commons was a ‘club’, a ‘brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise’, and although he and Nicolson were never significant political players, both were keen observers. Nicolson became a devotee of Churchill’s, refusing to join in the chorus of praise when Chamberlain announced that he was ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... something we’ve seen before. Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, to Ted and Mary Brown. Her father was a mining engineer, and her mother, as would be repeated over and over in the stories, was a Moynihan. The family name is significant. We are offered a picture of Lucia sucking worriedly at a bottle, not yet understanding that some days are ...”

“... glimpse of himself in a run-down theatre in New Jersey, listening to a black singer called Janice Brown perform numbers from the musical Evita, or driving the local roads listening to Sinéad O’Connor on the radio – she, too, is Evita, asking some place called Aryentina not to cry for her. But then in the next chapter, probably the strongest and darkest ...”

“... with plastic bowls of fruit at £1 a throw. The single gold coin is the dominant unit of exchange; brown tokens are trodden into tarmac like cigarette stubs or used gum. The blue wall carries a CORONET sign as a reminder of the building’s history. The ABC Cinema (as it was originally called) opened in 1932 as a 2000-seat Art Deco conversion of the former ...”

“... EXTRACTS’ accounted for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could ...”

“... was Nazi Germany. Not long ago, the American Historical Review published an article by Kate Brown – which Pipes surely disliked, if he read it – with the arresting subtitle ‘Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place’. In the old days, it was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that were ‘nearly the same place’, and the underpinning ...”

“... tries to weaken this with the spelling ‘Mama’). ‘Mamma’ transforms Combray into a Laura-Ashleyfied English nursery and the dilemmas of the neurasthenically Oedipal boy into the problems of a little Lord Fauntleroy, best dealt with by a vigorous spanking at a suitably brutal public school (to take an alternative example, could one imagine that ...”

“... simply stamped out; with the Pre-Raphaelites, there was indeed such a potential – he cited Madox Brown’s house, where ‘there were not only artists but also atheists, political refugees, vagrants: there was the kind of widening which was questioning the order of a much wider area’ – and this did link to Morris’s development. But Williams could not ...”

“... misdeeds. It seems to have been written at a single sitting: the ink colour is a uniform dark brown. It was no doubt intended for Giacomo’s father, who was to foot the bill, but it acquires in extenso a curiously personal coloration, a tone of exasperated fondness, so that what is intended as a rather crotchety list of complaints achieves a quality ...”

“... Lynne did something similar when she got pregnant at 16 in San Diego in 1967: made my stepsister Laura (who was ten at the time) jump off a sofa onto her stomach to make it ‘pop’. The gambit failed to produce the desired effect. Lynne had the baby in a Catholic place for unwed mothers and left it with an adoption agency. She later married Bill, a ...”

“... a shadowy earlier affair with Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, a novelist under the name ‘Laura Talbot’ who was generally known as ‘La’. Lois finally withdrew her moderately stabilising influence, divorcing him in 1953, and his marriage to La a year later was not a successful fresh start. In 1956, he underwent ECT for alcoholic depression. A ...”

“... of the Trump Links golf course, the name spelled out in giant letters of grey bricks set into the brown grass. It was a Tuesday morning, and we were on the way to see Donald Trump address an arena full of New Hampshire residents at Great Bay Community College on the outskirts of Portsmouth. On the radio the former Colorado senator and disgraced 1984 ...”