Search Results

“... So he created an effect of effortless colloquialism and spontaneity which belies its own artistry. Charles Martin’s handsome book seeks to emphasise the modernity of Catullus’s poetry and examines the relationships of individual poems to each other with a view to proving that they were arranged by Catullus himself, and not, as is often claimed, by ...”

“... Scholars seem not to have disturbed them until after the Second World War. Sylvère Monod’s Charles Dickens Novelist (1953) is credited with being the first study to revive interest in the working notes as a royal road to Dickensian interpretation. This was followed by Kathleen Tillotson and John Butt’s Dickens at Work (1957), and by the same ...”

“... The title page of this book tells us that it is ‘published to commemorate the centenary of Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet’s grandson and biographer, born 8 November 1879, died 22 June 1977’. Charles Tennyson was very far from being the most eccentric of all the Tennysons, but he is the most astonishing of them at least in one regard: that of enhanced, rather than merely sustained, activity in extreme old age ...”

“... of the war, by occupying the area before the Allies did. This own-goal-that-almost-was inspired Charles Cholmondeley, an eccentric RAF flight lieutenant seconded to MI5, to propose sending another corpse to Spain with papers that the Spanish would show to the Germans. Cholmondeley was secretary to the Twenty Committee, which ran double agents and whose ...”

“... sold itself as a think tank pamphlet. Two of those hired to fill senior editorial positions, Charles Leadbeater and Martin Jacques, were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of ...”

“... well aware that drapery seen through a solid transparent sphere could never be without distortion. Martin Kemp tried to explain this anomaly on the grounds that Leonardo was observing the principle of decorum: just as artists didn’t show refraction of Christ’s legs in water in paintings of his baptism, so too Leonardo avoided it here. The argument seems ...”

“... an old Irish saying goes, ‘while he takes the gold out of your teeth.’In Master of the Game, Martin Indyk shows Kissinger at work before, during and after the October War, and highlights his most acclaimed achievements in its aftermath: persuading Israel to cede small patches of occupied territory and convincing Egypt and Syria to recognise the ...”

“... more active covert gays of his time. There was a major release of new material with the grandson Charles Tennyson’s 1949 Life. Now – in the age of the welfare state – the poet’s gloom was traced to his deprived childhood. Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby rectory ...”

“... Newman’s conversion to Rome five years earlier finally reached the nation as a whole. As Brian Martin reports, Punch brutally caricatured ‘a thin, emaciated, bespectacled Newman’ alongside ‘a fat, hypocritical Wiseman’ and rumours spread that Newman ‘was married and had locked his wife away in a convent’. Newman survived the assault, of ...”

“... between Egypt and the rest of Africa had earlier been set out by the radical French scholars, Charles François Dupuis and Constantine de Volney, at the end of the 18th century, while the idea of Egypt as the source of Greek and hence of Western civilisation was the conventional wisdom at that time, and had been proclaimed with particular fervour by the ...”

“... in the museum of the past. So many Victorian things do; it seems a feature of that epoch. R.B. Martin’s skills as a biographer, already manifest in his detailed and persuasive studies of Tennyson, FitzGerald and Charles Kingsley, are at their best in that rich Victorian ambience where religion, art and sex mingled in ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished. As the first major biography since Hallam Tennyson’s pious memoir of 1897, it has obvious importance ...”

“... was indicted on charges of corruption. There was a minor skirmish when the Post assigned Judith Martin, a writer from its Style section, to cover the White House wedding of Tricia Nixon. Announcing a ban on Ms Martin, who had marked Tricia’s engagement by comparing her with a vanilla icecream cone, a White House ...”

“... prerogative court that used inquisitorial methods (including torture) and operated without juries. Charles I exploited these powers during his 11 years of rule without parliament (the era of ‘the old despotism’), and in 1641 parliament responded by legislating for the Star Chamber’s abolition. This removed most but not all of the council’s judicial ...”

“... This book was the subject of a particularly vitriolic review in the Sunday Tribune by one Martin Mansergh. Mansergh’s father, Nicholas, is the distinguished Cambridge historian, and Mansergh fils (a Protestant) is Head of Research in the opposition Fianna Fail party. ‘Research’ is Fianna Fail code for ‘Northern Ireland’, and English readers ...”