Search Results

“... 1948), but there are enough new ones here to cause excitement, and every reason to be grateful to Betty Bennett for her careful and considerable labours. The new material also provides at least one curious story. It concerns Jane Williams, whose lover Edward drowned with Shelley, and who became the emotional centre of Mary’s life for some time ...”

“... grievous wound. Seymour tells this story of betrayal well. She is also able, largely thanks to Betty Bennett’s painstaking and brilliant recovery of the history of ‘Walter Sholto Douglas’, as set out in her book Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (1991), to illuminate Mary Shelley’s proud assertion, in her journal for October ...”

“... empty bottle of Jeyes fluid . . . Of course it’s bleak. MR MORTIMER: Miss Plunkett. Betty. MISS PLUNKETT: You know my name? MR MORTIMER: It’s embroidered on your knitting bag. Betty. There is hope. MISS PLUNKETT: Where? MR MORTIMER: It is in the nature of the companion that she is never entirely ...”

“... Antiques Roadshow, a brass and pewter gill measure from a milk pail, for instance (wielded at the Bennett family back door by the milkman, Mr Keen, his horse and trap waiting in the street); a posser for the clothes wash and jelly moulds galore. Even so I was surprised this summer when going round Blickling to see a young man rapt in contemplation of a ...”

“... Elsie, secretary to his father, took her bottom-pinching Führer-friendly boss in her stride, so Betty, the secretary to the son, never turned a hair when she came across his lunchtime reading in the shape of the splayed buttocks of some gym-slipped tot, just covering it briskly with a copy of the Library Association Record and carrying on cataloguing. One ...”

“... family member to consider. Preston is consistently sympathetic to Maxwell’s long-suffering wife, Betty. Her book about her life with him, A Mind of My Own, published in 1994 after she asked for, and received, personal help from Murdoch, is a poignant contribution to the various accounts of his life. She describes Maxwell on his first arrival in liberated ...”

“... a master spy, though not much harder than accommodating to the known fact that he was a big fan of Betty Hutton and Carmen Miranda (Judy Garland one would have understood). And even though Wittgenstein was never big on small talk, he must have been tempted in those dark days of the war to drop the name of his former schoolmate, which he never seems to have ...”

“... valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at Evelyn’s “provincial little Arnold Bennett arriviste appearance”.’ If Chelsea (and Oxford) might be at odds with Bloomsbury (and Cambridge) for territorial competitive reasons, the two were at one when it came to making bad blood. ‘Never tell lies,’ the young Connolly had adjured ...”

“... Russell Harty on his deathbed had his tracheotomy tube removed, in order to be able to tell Alan Bennett that the princess had asked how he was, twice.Every celebrity seems to have fantasised about sex with the princess. Eddie Fisher claimed that he had had an affair with her. When her marriage was breaking up, Peter Sellers was besotted with the idea that ...”

“... a widow. A widow ... This afternoon. Half-past two ... How’s it feel to be bereaved?’ ‘Betty,’ said the young man. ‘Congratulations. You’re an aunty. Aunty Betty. I won’t ask you to guess,’ he went on hurriedly. ‘It’s a girl. Susan’s over the moon. And I am.’ With each call his enthusiasm had ...”

“... to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on somebody’s rug and scooping up ‘a handful of faeces like a guilty child’. In his new biography, Jeffrey Meyers quotes one of the two alleged witnesses ...”

“... plumply to a reassuring pat from his wife. One of the names submitted in contention with Max was Betty, the claims for which had been quite belligerently advanced by a smallish young man in a black suit and shaven head who was sitting towards the front with several other young men similarly suited and shorn, one or two of them with sunglasses lodged on top ...”

“... That Dare Not Speak Its Name. (Consider Stein and Hemingway, Bishop and Lowell, k.d. lang and Tony Bennett, or me and my best pal Rob.) But even she acknowledges that Art had a ‘sadistic streak’ and liked to play nasty games with people. She disses poor Laurie (the interviewer-wife) for falling in with Pepper’s ‘egotistical’ demands. Like all ...”