Search Results

“... the appropriation of Auschwitz (including Höss himself) by a thick, mainstream American novel, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: this actually has some reality about it, because it’s pretty sure in its own conventions, corny as these are. Sophie is a dazzlingly beautiful survivor of Auschwitz, and while the pathos of her past is revealed in extended ...”

“... begins, least lightly. His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came and took what he wanted. And of course there were those who got hurt. But obvious though that is, revisionist historians today dwell less on the changes imposed by the Normans than on what they were content to leave alone. That is not the way it ...”

“... local families – was rapidly replaced by an international economy of paper credit.In his Utopia, Thomas More is introduced to the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus on the docks at Antwerp. But the utopian tradition in the Low Countries, centred on luilekkerland (‘lazy-delicious-land’), was meatier, and more Antwerpian. In one luilekkerland story written in ...”

“... know how to think straight – and Donoghue does get Davie curiously wrong when he classes Thomas Hardy and British Poetry with Larkin’s Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse as arguing that ‘the Modernism of Eliot and Pound was a false trail,’ when this was precisely the basis on which Davie attacked Larkin. Where Eliot was ...”

“... England there was nothing. The absence of English Scriptures helps explain the great impact that William Tyndale’s English translations, first of the New Testament and then of substantial parts of the Old, had on the country in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in ...”

“... more interesting – than you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the English ...”

“... to the Vaughan affair, and here there’s an intriguing bridge between fact and fiction. In Thomas Hughes’s autobiographical novel, Tom Brown’s affection for the beautiful Arthur sets him wondering whether Arthur has a sister he might marry. In real life ‘Arthur’ was Arthur Stanley (ultimately dean of Westminster), and his sister Catherine ...”

“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”

“... equestrian dash. The three figures about whom Stubbs has most to say, the poets Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew and William Davenant, do to varying degrees answer to that description. Though his book makes no claims to archival discovery, it lights up their writing and brings fresh perception to the ties of friendship ...”

“... to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ‘calling’, joining the band of radical civil servants who supported Indian ...”

“... by three botanists, each supposedly stumbling on it independently. In 1906, William Bateson, the most forceful champion of Mendel’s work in Britain, dubbed the new science ‘genetics’. Those 34 years of obscurity have fascinated historians of science. Why was such a major advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in ...”

“... an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best about Ibsen what others abhorred – his ...”

“... reader, much affected by a series of iconoclastic texts she encountered early in life, including Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and William Godwin’s Political Justice. She favoured the rights of women (perhaps as a result of reading Mary Wollstonecraft), and briefly attempted to found a Godwinian commonwealth with ...”

“... socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a ...”

“... assumption: that enormous power and influence was wielded first by Cardinal Wolsey, and then by Thomas Cromwell, leaving Henry as a kind of wilful but malleable presence in the background of the political process, riding out to hunt or joust while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory ...”