Search Results

“... these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed return to history in Renaissance/early modern studies over the last fifteen ...”

“... in a novel which came out in 1903, the very year before ‘Mrs Bathurst’ was published, when Henry James allows his Strether drily to envisage his own loss of hope in life – and The Ambassadors is another love-story – as a train’s ‘faint, receding whistle miles and miles down the line’. Such a literary context suggests a bearing for the ...”

“... the theological spadework that enabled the Tudors to break the old Christian prohibition on usury. Henry VIII legalised it; Edward VI recriminalised it; since Elizabeth I restored her father’s financial initiative in 1571 – albeit with a cap of 10 per cent – lending and borrowing money at interest has stealthily metamorphosed from rarity to ...”

“... life. For the first century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative – Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev. J.E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) and W. and R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913). These pioneers had two main messages to ...”

“... the best plan is to pipe down. 25 August. Second day shooting a documentary on Westminster Abbey. Henry VII’s Chapel, which the Abbey prefers (and the pious Henry VII would, I’m sure, have preferred) to call the Lady Chapel, is to be closed at the end of the week for cleaning and repairs so we have two days to film all ...”

“... as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own useful tripartite formula for what the novelist’s ...”

“... Browning, and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for dramatic and narrative ...”

“... father was an assistant professor at Harvard, that Cambridge was still thought of as the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern ...”

“... celebrated Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain, Beauvoir was told, when the United States had its own sophisticated tradition of internal, psychological exploration; she was witnessing the formation of the American Studies canon – Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, ...”

“... but implied that it had survived the crash only because of its undue influence in high places: Henry Paulson, its former CEO, was Bush’s treasury secretary. Since then the firm has suffered one public relations disaster after another, culminating in a $550 million out-of-court settlement to avoid prosecution for fraud by the Securities and Exchange ...”

“... that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon noted that when in 2005 James Wolfensohn negotiated an agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which was intended to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the Occupied Territories, the IDF eased them for the settlers instead; for Palestinians, the number of ...”

“... explorers, not usually prone to doubts. ‘What should be called the source of a river?’ Henry Morton Stanley asked. ‘A lake which receives the insignificant rivers flowing into it and discharges all by one great outlet, or the tributaries which the lake collects?’ Stanley favoured the former theory, pointing out that otherwise it would be ...”

“... In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV ...”

“... in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church. But he is also seen as a lawyer-layman caught in the mesh of presumptuous ecclesiology, an English Cicero of the pre-Reformation who ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the use of ...”