Search Results

“... Adrian Room has garnered umpteen dedications, and some of them are of interest, but what is the point of unrolling them alphabetically as something purporting to be a dictionary? Abbott opens, and Zangwill closes, yet the book is not a work of reference. It is an anthology. A lazy piece of work, or of relaxation, and not just because its compiler has declined the effort of an imaginative ordering and has instead fallen back on A to zzzz ...”

“... could bear the specific sense of ‘female infant’. This semantic shift is not mentioned in Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Changes in Meaning, but it seems to be one of the few things that have escaped his notice. There are books that please you greatly by telling you what you know already, and almost as much by telling you what you do not ...”

“... James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of his energy) to the professional life he chose. Fieldhead was the magic enclosure to which, as an adult, he looked back, wishing that it might have been possible ...”

“... compositions of ukiyo-e with his vibrant palette. In The Painter’s Children in the Japanese Room, he alternates between scrupulous modelling in the bent legs and fanning arm of his daughter, and abstraction in the blotches of fabric and the doll dropped on the floor. Flesh emerges enigmatically against the decorative surface. Especially enchanting are ...”

“... who think that once the erotic storm has passed everything will be as right as rain. The effect of Adrian Bested’s first meeting – or perhaps we had better say, in view of what happens on her living-room floor, his first encounter – with Diana is lasting, limiting and ultimately lethal. The wife of Rodney Foxborough, a ...”

“... me idle and useless when she found me reading. She objected to me spending too much time in my room, but if I walked into the living room she’d go silent and turn her back on me. She complained that I didn’t help out with the chores, but when, after that, I made a cup of tea after a meal, she poured it away and made ...”

“... There’s a moment in this book – some time in the 1960s – when Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell have been asked to Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk to do a poetry reading. They ring the doorbell and a liveried footman tells them that they should go to the servants’ entrance. ‘I said, let’s leave. “No,” Adrian said ...”

“... launching party for David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy in the Moses Room of the House of Lords on 22 October was the third occasion on which I had been inside that curious place since taking my seat as a hereditary member of it. The Moses Room is evidently so called because its walls depict, in ...”

“... more often than not as source material for whimsical and mildly defamatory character sketches. Adrian Frazier’s painstakingly researched new biography of Moore marks a considerable advance on Joseph Hone’s respectful but pedestrian 1936 standard biography and Tony Gray’s lively but unscholarly 1996 Life. Moore was born in 1852 into the West of ...”

“... his wife. He is disappointed with it; the woman’s body is unradiant, ‘reduced, in this neat room, to a kind of propriety’. But he is pleased to be disappointed, we infer. The painting frames and reduces the prospect of grief, or guilt, or passion. It leaves him ‘bored rather than disturbed, but forced to shrug, to demonstrate to himself that these ...”

“... paintings, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a dollar sign. For some critics, it was all too much. Adrian Searle, writing for the Guardian, complained about the ‘fuss’ over Brown, which led inevitably to disappointment when confronted with her paintings: ‘The energy flows out of me as I look at them, searching for faces, body parts, the reason behind all ...”

“... 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 usually called in the 1820s and 1830s, had become a hot topic in some London scientific ...”

“... photographers of haunting; Eugène Atget, who rarely shows the inhabitants of a Parisian street or room, dwells on the smiling mannequins in shop windows, wearing aprons and housemaids’ caps, or on an effigy of madame in a string of pearls and a tilted trilby. Fixed expressions and rigid bodies give the images an uncanny aura – something similar radiates ...”

“... epoch in which any individual could singlehandedly precipitate a major shift in human thought. Adrian Desmond and James Moore place Darwin above Marx and Freud. It is hard to think of successors to that trinity of lone rangers in an age when research is financed by foundations and carried on by teams and generally mounted on the kind of scale where the ...”

“... but she cautioned her lover against telling her sister anything. I found she had told Adrian [their younger brother], which means Duncan, all about the Ottoline affair. She hadn’t only given him a general sketch but had told him every detail. It doesn’t matter, I think, as Adrian tells me that Duncan is ...”