Search Results

“... Cassandra bequeathed the scant batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in ...”

“... literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional therapists, Gestaltists, not to mention a highly pragmatic member of the ...”

“... two women in the narrator’s life (he refers to his wife as ‘Madam’ and to his lover as ‘my Lady’) have encountered one another with good grace, each afterwards praising to him the attributes of the other: Now, Madam’s faulty feature is a glazed And inaccessible eye, that has soft fires, Wide gates, at love-time only. This admires My ...”

“... extraordinary outburst young(ish) Milton inserted into his aristocratic masque Comus, in which the Lady (sometimes seen as a self-portrait of the chaste and serious Milton) attacks the enchanter Comus: If every just man that now pines with want Had but a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast ...”

“... the word stretches to untold pleasure or perturbation: ‘Evening pleasant enough; went into some lady’s room by mistake, thinking it mine. Great fuss thereanent.’ Lear’s nonsense is full of mistakes that both the characters and their creator may or may not want to make, and Jenny Uglow’s absorbing new biography brings to the fore the question of the ...”

“... mind ‘unforced’. (The first draft was written in a philosophy class and called ‘The Bored Lady’ – the eventual title was ‘Ennui’.) Though simpler, it wasn’t very different from the later poems that would lead Eliot to place her ‘among the half-dozen most “exciting” contemporary European and American poets’. Asked about the poem’s ...”

“... his prime’ At three score ten. But money was not time. ‘I am a mixture of Santa Claus, Lady Bountiful, the Good Samaritan, Baron Richthofen, J.P. Morgan, Casanova. I am tender as a woman, brave as a lion, and can fight like a cat.’ This is the way Charles E. Merrill described himself. In truth, his considerable generosity notwithstanding, he was ...”

“... history! The low-minded ruffian!’ His final phrase taunts Forrest in terms borrowed from Lady Macbeth: ‘That man would commit a murder, if he dare.’ Newspapers on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall, and soon on both sides of the Atlantic, were full of the affair for weeks. Three years later, when Macready embarked on a protracted farewell tour of the ...”

“... too . . . Tears were streaming down our faces but we were just about under control when a lady in the audience said: ‘Ahh, those two must have been really fond of him.’ That our mirth had been mistaken for grief had never occurred to us, and I’m afraid we began to howl with laughter. The audience watched us with deep sympathy. Maria stared ahead ...”

“... is his talk … He will be an Inamorato poeta, & sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swinesnout, his yellow-faced mistress.’ In Joseph Hall’s Satires (1597) there is a similarly disenchanted view of poets who ‘filch whole pages at a clap, for need,/From honest Petrarch, clad in English weed’. He notes that they begin each stanza with ...”

“... solid, sensible instruments one has always hankered after. More ‘artistic’, I suppose. An old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to ...”

“... underscore the anatomy rather than hide it’. Well, yes, one did not have to be an aristocratic lady to notice that. Another omission from these pages is any discourse on the subject of T-shirts boasting slogans, advertisements, names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels ...”

“... tradition and brings to mind the bemusement of the 18th-century Turkish ladies on discovering Lady Mary Wortley-Montague’s corsets and their conviction that these corsets were a kind of overall chastity belt into which her husband had padlocked her before he allowed her to leave England. Ms Johnson has plenty of good ‘foreign’ stuff: the humbly-born ...”

“... an odd crew: an Australian journalist with troubles on the domestic front, an eccentric British lady of means who wants to stamp out female circumcision, a morose American aid worker and a young French girl in search of her father, a network cameraman, who long ago went missing to work in the hills with the rebels. (The last character is based on the ...”

“... do is to imagine someone who is not me, though not someone I know, being 50. She looks like an old lady; the way old ladies currently look. She looks like someone else. I can’t connect me thinking about her with the fact that I will be her in 41 years’ time. She has lived through and known 41 years to which I have no access. I can’t believe I will become ...”