Search Results

“... features in the absorbing ‘Brief Biographical Glossary of Lesser Known Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother ...”

“... People always liked Jimmy Stewart and were amazed by his good luck. In the late 1930s, he worked under contract for the studio moguls at MGM. Almost alone in the industry, he later professed to have pleasant memories of the experience. He had affairs with many of his leading ladies, including Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich, as well as Norma Shearer, Olivia de Havilland and others, with no hard feelings on either side except in the case of Dietrich ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... group is any better than its drummer,’ the Rolling Stones’ late piano player Ian Stewart tells A.E. Hotchner. ‘Drummers are the heart of a group,’ confirms Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience: ‘a good one is worth his weight in gold.’ And here is the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock on drummer Paul Cook: ‘that steady rhythm of ...”

“... spaceflight to a Chris Marker documentary about the Pacific War and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – to help her navigate the territory. Some are more successful than others, but they all expose the doubleness of Chilean society in a period when life could be either peaceful or extremely dangerous, depending on who you were. Sometimes the two worlds ...”

“... Hollywood, teddy boy, Belle Epoque. These had some unlikely enthusiasts. You might think of Rod Stewart as a rasping, boozy rock star with a football fixation, but in these pages he is also revealed, deliciously, as an ‘Art Nouveau and Deco aficionado’. His album Every Picture Tells a Story (1971) ‘bore a Deco sunburst pattern, while his two homes ...”

“... told him was the highest habitation of man.’ And to Hannah Arendt in 1962 (I owe this to Carol Brightman, the incisive McCarthy scholar) she chortled over the conceit that Dwight was a hoax, or a species of ambulant practical joke, on himself and others. ‘Quite a funny idea ...’ she wrote, ‘that Dwight is a kind of self-made invention or ...”

“... rise of British clutter.* Mass Observation had been asking people to describe their homes. ‘Carol Daniel,’ Sandbrook writes, was a 29-year-old Tesco shelf-stacker, living at an end of terrace house in Havering, Essex, with her husband and children. Their living room has an armchair, an orange three-section sofa, a birdcage, a fish tank and a wooden ...”

“... names, double and triple barrelled: Heathcote-Amery, Bonham-Carter, Sackville-West, Vane-Tempest-Stewart. And mostly their forenames ended, as well-bred girls’ forenames must, in ‘a’: Nigella, Cosima, Candida, Sophia, Samantha, Sabrina, Lucinda. ‘Famous Englishmen write to me about their daughters,’ Attallah shrugs. ‘What else can I do? I have to ...”

“... a Letter from a Woman’.These women philosophers required a good deal of grit. As the historian Carol Pal has shown, many 17th-century women scholars went out of their way to forge intergenerational networks of sorority, recognising that while men were needed to access a life of letters, they could not be relied on to sustain women in that life (Astell ...”