Search Results

“... invitation arrived to a meal to celebrate the winter solstice. Only six people would be there, and no electric light. That afternoon – it was a Saturday – we took the children to the pantomime. This year it was The Snow Queen. She was coldly glittery, and swirled around the stage in a platinum cloak with her comic entourage of ravens and spiders. The ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John Singer Sargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting ...”

“... remarking later that ‘history came to my aid.’ He tried to join the Welsh Horse Yeomanry, with no experience of horses, and then the Artists Rifles, but was deficient in chest measurement, before succeeding with the newly raised London Welsh battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a regiment in which commissions were held by Graves and Sassoon (neither of ...”

“... a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that.Harold​ Nicolson was writing to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... so early in the morning and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ascent. As far as clothes were concerned, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this morning, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on ...”

“... shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil engineer, built sewers, I think.– Which is a very Scottish thing to be doing.Building ...”

“... and a great deal of cold water ... he says it is useless, that I am going to do a thing with no basis to do it on ... “Look I am going to forge a weapon for you; and thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he replied: “The weapon is too small to be of any value.” ’ Ashbee’s experiments, from the workshops of the Guild ...”

“... let alone what the matches meant to millions of ardent fans. Listeners and viewers have been no less ardent about some of the BBC’s programmes, as a ceaseless correspondence of complaint and enthusiasm has made clear over the decades, but how far can historians capture the subjective experience of the living room and integrate it into institutional ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... poets who are not greatly involved with the styles or personalities of their time, whose work sets no puzzles and makes a sufficiently vivid impression all by itself. It’s hard to disagree with Elsie, who after her husband’s death sold his books and artefacts, destroyed letters and wrote to an earlier would-be biographer: ‘I must say that a critical ...”

“... from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:at your tabletelephone ringsevery four minutestalkof terrible thingsthe papers bringingno good news                                (‘New York’)False history gets ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the ...”

“... Suffering from depression, he was analysed by the perceptive but corrupt psychotherapist John Layard, who went to bed with him; his father paid for the analysis, and Layard, when Redgrove explained the Game to him, said simply: ‘That’s your mother.’ With its epitaph from Baudelaire – ‘C’est elle! Noire et pourtant ...”

“... Christopher Harper-Mercer​ wrote that he had no life. He had no girlfriend and no job; the world was against him. He lived with his mother only a few miles from the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Oregon, and he collected guns. He shot nine people dead at the college on 1 October and injured nine others before killing himself ...”