Search Results

“... her friends, many of them mutual friends of whose discomfiture she was oblivious. To Rupert Hart-Davis she wrote that Cecil and his wife were ‘like two wheels of a bicycle propelling the stark frame of their life together, never meeting’. It is a good image. Hastings, who is a sympathetic but not an indulgent biographer, knows when to introduce ...”

“... out of the house and stashed them in the hills’. He was so sure that his younger sister, Mary, was the mother of God that he would prostrate himself before her, which she found unbearable. (She changed her name to Lindsay.) They grew up frightened of showing anger or strong emotions: they didn’t want to be put on psychiatric drugs too. To get out ...”

“... always so. In early modern Britain, animals were tried along with humans for bestiality. In 1677, Mary Hicks, a married working-class woman, was brought before London’s Central Criminal Court on the charge of having sex with her dog. The dog was brought into court and ‘set on the Bar before the prisoner’. He immediately started ‘wagging his tail, and ...”

“... imply the presence of at least one other character too. Take this sixty-word wonder by Lydia Davis (it’s called ‘The Outing’):An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat ...”

“... and scores of his cat postcards, cartoons and children’s books can still be found. Like Degas or Mary Cassatt, Wain could draw a perfectly normal-looking cat when he wanted to – at least for a while. But over time the anthropomorphised expressions become more and more intense, bug-eyed and oddly sinister (notably when the feline subject is shown ...”

“... and publicly she was clearly a monstre sacré almost indistinguishable from any other (Bette Davis, for example), a person entirely different from the unworldly, dedicated creator and pure fount of originality she had been during the first half of this century. In those days she had exemplified the difficulty of telling the dancer from the dance as ...”

“... Kötting’s felt helmet, gives him the aspect of an assistant executioner waiting for a crack at Mary Queen of Scots. All the marchers had authentic Europhile connections and antecedents. The Anglo-German Kötting made films in France and escaped whenever he could to a primitive forest house beside an old Cathar track in the Pyrenees. Barton came to Hastings ...”

“... was the embodiment of the revolutionary democracy we had not yet learned how to imagine,’ Angela Davis observed. ‘My people need inspiration,’ Simone said. In the spectacle she made of herself as well as in her voice – ‘I want people to know who I am,’ she said – Simone became a race champion. In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of the Urban ...”

“... the closest model for a belletrist sans merci was the critic, novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail ...”

“... a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...”

“... cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a privileged ...”

“... this Hollywood dreck, Ben?’ Roth wanted to know, ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis?’ Yeah, Ben, what gives? Roth: ‘You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the 1980s. When I had her.’ When I had her: how the phrase just rolls off the ...”

“... position in the city changed somewhat in 1864 when Oscar was nine. A patient of William’s called Mary Travers claimed that the doctor had given her chloroform and raped her. When Lady Wilde wrote a letter vilifying her, Mary Travers sued for libel. She won a farthing damages; and while the legal costs were high, Wilde won ...”

“... don’t.I remember Jennifer with about the same clarity that I remember the young Jane Eyre, Mary from The Secret Garden, Peter Pan and Alice. Rather less clarity, in fact, since the last four are readily available on my bookshelves and I have reacquainted myself with them quite regularly. Jennifer, I’ve merely remembered from time to time over an ...”

“... photographic artist, lived in Flat 173 in the same part of the building with her mother, Mary Mendy. Khadija was born in Hammersmith and went to school in Ladbroke Grove but her family was originally from Gambia. Their flat was a shrine, of a sort, to all their combined memories and passions. It was a home not a house: the large framed mirror on the ...”