Search Results

“... while less visible property could be discovered by asking ‘divers the neighbours of the said Thomas Grene what the said Thomas Grene is worth’. The system of circulating credit generated its own information about property. The witness who said John Tanner couldn’t ‘levye xx s’ claimed to know that because he ...”

“... betrayal. There is genius, and there is fame. Feel Free also includes exhilarating essays on Joni Mitchell and Justin Bieber: the first at the same time an investigation of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘attunement’, the second of Martin Buber’s concept of ‘meeting’. About Bieber-Buber (‘alternative spellings of the same German surname’), Smith ...”

“... esteem until he is demoted after a show of petulance at a tactless mention of his archrival Thomas Mann. Herman Broch was Canetti’s great friend at the beginning of the period but fades out of the narrative as it continues. As for poor Karl Kraus, the mentor who had urged and inspired Canetti to write Auto da Fé, his is the most summary dismissal of ...”

“... wasn’t until the 20th century that the novel’s more violent aspects were addressed, notably by Thomas Mann, who in 1944 called it ‘colourful, wild, crude, amusing, amorous … boiling over with life and death … and immortal in the splendour of its sins’. Following Mann’s assessment, Günter Grass used Simplicissimus as the model for The Tin ...”

“... Steiner’s confession, turns on a ‘hook’. The hook, in this case, comes from a song on Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, which is at the centre of a long anecdote Smith tells about being driven to Tintern Abbey. ‘Switch it off,’ Smith begs the driver, ‘that bloody piping … like a bee caught in a wing mirror’. What she really wants is a service ...”

“... Amid the hyperbole it’s refreshing to hear that one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed ...”

“... ready to return to Dublin and the humblest employment; but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis ...”

“... what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas Beddoes, ‘with any degree of exactness, to our inward feelings.’ Miss Martineau’s tender womb certainly entered the public domain, and she was no slouch at what Post-Modernists now call ‘writing the body’; but for all that, the historian is left ...”

“... Moscow is the fount of spiritual nourishment, the known but unvisited other country, as Julian Mitchell terms it, in his play, Another Country. Fellow Travellers fits snugly with the success of the film version of the play, with the death of Blunt, and Britain’s continuing fascination with Thirties upper-class traitors. Worsley wrote the novel in the ...”

“... of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 square feet in more than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came ...”

“... thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at Scott’s suggestion. I decided to start collecting these ‘meetings’, so ...”

“... that puts them beyond query. The man who did much of the pioneering work for the Civil War – Thomas Livermore – was himself a veteran of the war who went on to a career in law and business. He was not a professional historian or demographer. And his interest in the historical record was very different from ours: his aim was to show that the soldiers of ...”

“... For thirty years he railed in vain against the leadership, first of MacDonald, Snowden and Jimmy Thomas, then of Attlee, Morrison, Bevin and the upstart Gaitskell, antagonising the union bosses and the PLP equally, the darling only of the constituencies. He was expelled from the party in 1939 and very nearly again in 1955, and by the time Attlee finally ...”

“... colleagues, and sending his findings back to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer. Why did Moorer and the rest of the top brass feel so uninformed about national security? The reason was simple: Nixon and Kissinger had been running grand strategy – not least, the openings to China and the Soviet Union – out of the White House ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”