Search Results

“... accurate, reference to the trust deed was eliminated by the vice-chancellor, who substituted this passage: ‘Within the convergence policy the university has allowed significant autonomy to the institute recognising both its geographical location and its individualised cataloguing position.’ He then forwarded the document to Crewe as if it was entirely my ...”

“... of the sects and of their cherished principle of liberty of conscience. In 1649 the execution of Charles I and the creation of the English republic were opposed by the Levellers, whose defeat by the high command of the New Model Army was clinched by those events. The Levellers are admired as friends of ‘the people’, but the concept of a collective ...”

“... admonition (especially the last sentence) is what I try to hold in mind when I give my sense of Charles Tomlinson’s poetry. Those who have been aghast at the churlish reviews of Tomlinson’s Poetry and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many ...”

“... former schoolchildren to a single, conveniently packaged occurrence: the invention of Evolution in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. It is, however, a date that does not figure in Adrian Desmond’s masterful account of the initial rise and decline of evolutionary theory in Britain. While Darwin was still afloat on the Beagle, transmutation, as it was ...”

“... more active covert gays of his time. There was a major release of new material with the grandson Charles Tennyson’s 1949 Life. Now – in the age of the welfare state – the poet’s gloom was traced to his deprived childhood. Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory ...”

“... Lois and Charles Orr, an inquisitive, left-of-left couple, arrived in Barcelona in the autumn of 1936. Charles was 30, a serious fellow from Michigan; Lois was 19, more or less fresh from Kentucky. They had married earlier in the year and decided on a honeymoon in Europe. In Catalonia, a matter of weeks after Franco’s military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic, they settled happily into a political climate of intrigue and rivalry among the variegated species of anti-Fascists who failed, in the end, to hold the pass: bourgeois democrats and left republicans, socialists, anarchists and Marxists, as well as a host of foreigners, many in tune with the doctrines of the Communist International ...”

“... of ecstasy and the recurring moments of horror’. Eliot identifies the presence of the latter in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, in which he claims there is no ‘exploitation of the supernatural for the sake of the immediate shudder’. There are shudder-inducing images of horror in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion, figures of nightmare and ...”

“... In​ 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented ...”

“... quarrels and endless lawsuits for defamation. In 1638 Thomas Hobbes advised his aristocratic tutee Charles Cavendish ‘to avoid all offensive speech, not only open reviling but also that Satirical way of nipping’ that young noblemen were prone to: it would provoke ‘many just occasions of Duel’. Laughing at others, he warned, was a sign of prideful ...”

“... and Donne, and took a serious interest in religion; but he failed to assert British power abroad. Charles II was hailed as a new Augustus in panegyrics and on ceremonial arches, and it was in connection with his reign that the word ‘Augustan’ was first used of a cultural period. The comparison was developed by Higgons in 1726 but opposed by Warton and ...”

“... a private reason, rendering a long Voyage and absence particularly painful to me’ (another passage hitherto deleted), it’s surely the separation from Ellen that he fears. (His pull in America is illustrated by the £1000 he was paid by a New York editor for the short story ‘Hunted Down’ – an unsought offer he found too handsome to refuse.) In ...”

“... as a royal adviser said, ‘to be put in a new romanso’ – when the future Charles I and his father James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a ...”

“... is more drawn to an earlier episode in Paris two months earlier. The proclivities of King Charles IX were gratified at a great feast marked by ‘an exceptionally vile pièce de resistance in which a bag full of live cats and a fox was suspended thirty feet up over a huge bonfire, until the flames pulled the screaming mass down’. To that episode, in ...”

“... I belonged to the category he hated and feared. Yes, the moment of coming out, cardinal rite of passage in gay life, though of course the term ‘rite of passage’ can cover anything from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fé. I had already told my mother, not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when ...”

“... that subject, probably from personal experience. In an early thriller called ‘At the End of the Passage’, which is about officials under stress in an Indian heatwave, one of them finds himself sitting at the table as he enters his house, and the vision gets up and departs hastily. Visions have a special and decidedly creepy status in the stories, and seem ...”