Search Results

“... a variety of women in addition to his wife. One of Wells’s most famous liaisons was with Rebecca West, mother of the author of the latest Wells biography. They met in 1912 when she was 19, he 45. He was an established novelist and social critic, she an ambitious young feminist author, who was beginning to make a name for herself by tart and witty book ...”

“... free from sexual jealousy: this is the picture given also by others, including Wells’s son Anthony West. It is just that there is so much more that one would like to know about her, and would need to be told if the autobiography were to be really satisfying. As for H.G. Wells in Love, it consists of two unequal portions. First there is a long ...”

“... 10s a week he still got from his mother. He was 35. Eager for extra income, he took over from Anthony Blunt as the art critic at the Spectator. And he also took on work for the Ministry of Information. His first commission was to paint pictures of the control rooms for the ARP, the air raid precaution service. Where some of the older war artists working ...”

“... writers in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for the place of honour. Between these three women enough power should have been generated even for an impossible cause. They were tireless collectors of facts – Rose used to take her newspaper-cuttings everywhere – and what courage ...”

“... sombre persuasion is present as a perceptible shadow over almost all Wells’s fiction. His son Anthony West has asserted his father’s belief, or at least suspicion, ‘that in the long run all human effort was futile.’ Yet Wells was as clear as was the poet of ‘The Battle of Maldon’ about what, in the face of ultimate inevitable ...”

“... to Harold Macmillan. In July 1963, in a brilliant article in the Spectator (which I then owned), Anthony West, after depicting Senator McCarthy’s activities in America and exposing the potentialities for nonsense (still with us) in the concept of security risks, showed that it was ‘this game’ that Harold Wilson, George Wigg (‘that industrious ...”

“... into RADA at the age of ten, she made her own way as an actress. She played a leading role in the West End aged 15, and before long went to Hollywood. Back in England she fell ‘instantly’ in love with the 33-year-old film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, marrying him three years later. They had two sons; the older one ...”

“... it has also been retold by many other writers, among them Vincent Cronin in his Wise Man from the West (with a companion piece, A Pearl to India, on the career of De’Nobili). Ricci’s introduction into China of Western clocks, Western astronomy and Western mathematics has also attracted much attention from historians of science. If the story is to be told ...”

“... ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in the pillory served. Let’s get the blanket over ...”

“... the saturation of Iraq with modern weaponry and the transfer of military technology from East and West continued unabated. After the cease-fire in 1988, no serious attempt was made by the Great Powers to coerce Iraq into reinstating the 1975 Agreement with Iran on the land frontier and the division of the Shatt-el-Arab waterway, which Saddam had publicly torn ...”

“... on the western outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent there in early 1987, and his presence was a source of recurrent nightmares. Naturally I had put out feelers for an ...”

“... Woman and G. W. Sargent’s The Japanese Family Storehouse have been known for a long time in the West, and have led Saikaku to be thought of as a sort of Japanese Defoe. Paul Gordon Schalow’s labours in translating and introducing The Great Mirror of Male Love reveal a rather different Saikaku. This book is a collection of 40 short stories ‘depicting ...”

“... parts of southern France, the whole of America from California to Tierra del Fuego, the shores of West Africa, the Philippines, and regions of India and Japan. It was the most powerful and by far the richest empire the world had ever seen. ‘How strange a thing it is,’ one English observer reflected in 1609, ‘that all the states of Europe have been ...”

“... on the Hopi serpent ritual – the long-delayed result of the expedition to the American South-West which proved vital to Warburg’s understanding of religion, magic and much else. The Warburg revival resulted, in fact, from a complex – and sometimes contentious – collaboration among professional scholars, specialised publishers and journalists, of a ...”

“... awkwardly assembled and unevenly printed volume has commanded which preoccupy the first volume of Anthony James West’s The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, and they provide a very remarkable instance of the interplay between literature and the market, prompting all sorts of reflections on the curious ...”