Search Results

“... Colour brought photographs of champion roses (‘Birmingham Post’, a cross between ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Wendy Cussons’, from the National Rose Society’s Annual) and of rather dull canapés (from Good Housekeeping Colour Cookery of 1967). Nothing, it seemed, was so distant, hidden or commonplace that its appearance would be unrecorded for ...”

“... winner. As with horses, so with humans: the futurologist becomes a consultant to a wealthy owner; Elizabeth Zada, the animal psychic, gets the billionaire’s hand in marriage and a lucrative publishing deal. Randomness is accommodated within this pattern in the unpredictable fortunes of six thoroughbreds. The animals’ movements across states and continents ...”

“... the placing of images in sequence. I’ve mentioned one or two instances, and here’s another. Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun fades into a shot from Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, which gives way to Nosferatu, only to return to the Rossellini film and the great, desolate moment when a boy throws himself to his death from a high floor of a bombed ...”

“... as the blue wall four years ago, it is because centrist Democrats, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren constantly warned during the primary debates, have refused to learn the lessons of 2016. Biden’s campaign was only a tweaked version of Hillary Clinton’s failed playbook. This was illustrated most forcefully by Republican gains among Latino ...”

“... and varying tensions between private and public religious experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later respected Blackmore’s The Creation ...”

“... suggestive of an amorous courtly culture. She was as adept in the political uses of coquetterie as Elizabeth I of England. She owned mildly erotic books and her death chamber was hung with a tapestry of the Triumph of Eros as well as with one of the Miracle of the Mass. Much of her reputation for prudishness derived from her efforts to tidy up after her ...”

“... to explain. Its thesis approving tyrannicide, among other things, was quite as obnoxious to Queen Elizabeth, upon whose support the Confederate Lords had to count, as it was to her successor. McFarlane cites her instruction to Morton in 1573 that Buchanan was to be ‘warned of setting forth of the booke without advise from hence touching matters therein ...”

“... These are the years of early fame after Sons and Lovers, and of the publication of The Rainbow and its banning, and of Lawrence’s violent and despairing reactions to the war. He was already a fully recognised writer, a probable genius, and his more intimate correspondents include Cynthia Asquith, Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Edward Marsh, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Philip Heseltine, Mark Gertler ...”

“... Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted the allusion. He wasn’t one of your bully-boys or guttersnipes, but the son of a Lincolnshire ...”

“... autobiography the novel, we should recall that the Anglican Church was widely Calvinist under Elizabeth and James. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not so far as I know the consequence of a revolution, echoes on into 18th-century fiction, while the great European picaresque novel with its powerfully developed religious strain was, in the hands of the Spaniard ...”

“... good for them, that potatoes were not sufficient fare. In an article in the current Tatler, Mrs Elizabeth David laments that Salaman did not include recipes: in fact, he includes several. This is one, for the soup served in Epping Workhouse in the last years of the 18th century: ‘4 lbs pickled pork, 6 stones of shins and legs, 6 lbs of skibling (meat ...”

“... up cannot easily be demonstrated convincingly by a novelist who has planned what is to happen (Elizabeth Bowen failed at the same technique in The Heat of the Day), but at the same time the childhood of those two is given a wonderfully creepy quality, which would not be retrospectively diminished had they settled down as blameless housewives in Gerrard’s ...”

“... their details are of the pinafore-and-button-boot variety. Annie Wilson, ninth child of Enoch and Elizabeth (‘Father should have more consideration,’ her sisters used to grumble), tells of bread from the Board of Guardians and second-hand shoes, of guiding her father’s hand to sign a letter asking for work, of a mother who was ‘a beautiful ...”

“... Unit’s ‘brilliant adviser’; Kevin Stowe was a ‘very able’ Principal Private Secretary, Elizabeth Arnot a ‘bright young education specialist’, John Lyons a ‘very able’ general secretary, and Tom McNally an ‘excellent political secretary’. They were all quite wonderful, brilliant and magnificent, but unfortunately they could not tackle ...”

“... ribald speculations as to just what Petkanov might have done to merit the bestowal by Queen Elizabeth II of the Order of the Bath are, so far as I can see, the only thing in The Porcupine to betray its author’s English origins. Should the fallen Petkanov have been put on trial? The new regime, personified by Peter Solinsky, the Prosecutor General, is ...”