Search Results

“... staff. Whether I would have been quite so ebullient about it if I had known what I know now, after reading Geoffrey Taylor’s riveting book, is another matter entirely. To be sure, I knew that the dear old Grauniad was not exactly flush – my new salary would have told me that even if I hadn’t noticed that one of my future colleagues pinned his bus-tickets ...”

“... great narrative altarpieces of the Assumption, the Annunciation, the Resurrection and the Death of Peter Martyr. In front of the bare altar below Bellini’s painting in S. Giovanni Crisostomo today, there is a box into which money can be put in order to illuminate the painting by spotlights. Humfrey provides a fuller discussion of the original lighting of ...”

“... of what was surely a generous gesture on the part of an extremely busy publisher with far too much reading and writing on his hands already, it was certainly a remarkably deliberate one. In the normal way letters are written – unless one happens to be Lord Chesterfield – because they have to be or because more or less involuntary occasion calls them ...”

“... praises, but that the next age thinks a masterpiece’, to jolt the Australian consciousness into reading Stead and reclaiming her. By that year she was 62 and had been publishing for more than three decades.In 1969 she returned briefly to Australia after 41 years away. On her return to London she wroteUnder the soft spotted skies of the North Sea I had ...”

“... women (Sappho, actresses, Wagnerian singers) deeply affected her fiction. In an astute reading of Cather’s early journalism and literary criticism, O’Brien traces the change from her initial Victorian view of art as masculine – she keenly admired Stevenson and Kipling – and her scorn of ‘lady writers’ who she believed ‘lacked ...”

“... A friend​ who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of Bedford had imitated to Lord John Russell who imitated it to Bertrand Russell who imitated it to Conrad Russell who imitated it to J ...”

“... Certainly there is no other figure from the ancient world about whom we can know so much. As Peter White demonstrates, however, in his characteristically incisive and learned book, Cicero’s letters do not provide a window into his soul, any more than the numerous letters from his many correspondents provide a window into theirs (some of them seem to ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... elude that soporific ‘and then’? So, it is little surprise to find the prolific genre-bender Peter Ackroyd beginning his brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe with a recounting of his subject’s final days. Never mind that Paul Strathern’s recent biographical study, Poe in 90 Minutes, and a new novel by Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow, made the same ...”

“... rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”

“... too, is a biographical novel, but unlike Jigsaw, it also reads like a novel. It is impossible, reading Jigsaw, not to think one is reading an autobiography; and one is continually pulled up short by the thought that what one has taken to be a memory might well be an invention. It isn’t Bedford’s style to state the ...”

“... the brow-furrowing reminder of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, recently returned from a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark ...”

“... of the (many) unread classics, Don Quixote is a book almost no one seems to have any intention of reading. People don’t feel bad about ignoring it, don’t need to pretend they’ve read it, don’t say they’ve always been meaning to take it to the beach. I hope I’m wrong about the novel’s actual readership, for the sake of several publishers and many ...”

“... The guards dragged me away and locked me up until way into the night. By the time I got back to Reading the buses had all stopped, so I had to walk about three miles home. The next day, after an overnight self-inflicted haircut that made me look insane, I was back at the Commons. The guards recognised me and would not let me into the Strangers’ Gallery. I ...”

“... it was his job to deal with on a daily basis, and made no secret of it. ¡Olé! Sign him up! Reading the Diaries, one has to remind oneself that in terms of Blair’s relations with the public, the book mostly covers the good years, when we more or less still believed him. You would never know that from ...”