Search Results

“... such people as the maid-of-all-work in 1909 whose duties kept her busy from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.* Christopher Hampton gives us, in an anonymous 15th-century poem, a lament over women’s perpetual drudgery. His extract from the early feminist Mary Astell, writing in 1721, acknowledges that by comparison with Eastern women, who ‘are born Slaves, and ...”

“... by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when she tries to talk, can’t at first get her words out, but ...”

“... by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Athol Fugard or Sam Shepard. The tradition of unmannered acting, devotion to the text, unostentatious direction, simple and expressive design has been maintained. So also, until recently, has the ...”

“... of a stir a few years back, partly due to the excellence of the book itself, of the adaptation by Christopher Hampton, and of the charismatic central performance by Anthony Sher – and partly due to the blushes of self-congratulation that suffuse the BBC when it oversteps its own maidenly limits in matters sexual and political. More than all ...”

“... dexterity of her pelvic floor muscles’. And did Nureyev shit on Zeffirelli’s doorstep? Christopher Hampton insists that he heard Nureyev himself saying he did. But Nureyev is often the worst source of all for his own achievements and his masseur and bodyguard, Luigi, insists it never happened, though he undermines his case somewhat by saying ...”

“... essentially vulgar displays like the recent book and play on Hitler by George Steiner and Christopher Hampton. Only books of a very exceptional kind – Solzhenitsyn’s and the memoirs of Mandelstam’s widow – can confront the nature of the tyranny directly, and they do so, not by the poetic word, but by putting first-hand experience in order ...”

“... This is in many ways the full-dress portrait of the young man so brilliantly sketched by Christopher Hampton in Total Eclipse. The exotic otherness of Rimbaud to his Anglo-Saxon readers is indissociable from myths about French Revolutionary violence, the Paris Commune, Continental sexual mores, French art, French bohemianism, Parisian chic and ...”

“... Christopher Wren, England’s best known architect and one of its greatest natural philosophers, experimented with everything: stone and wood, cones and domes, animals and men. He liked to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, the motion of a planetary model into liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of ancient astronomy ...”

“... an underlying grammar. Towards the end of his life Brown, walking in the gardens he had created at Hampton Court, gave Hannah More the only personal account of his methods known to survive. ‘“Now there” said he, pointing his finger, “I make a comma, and there” pointing to another spot, “where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at ...”

“... Lear-and-Thurber-derived drawings, or a serious and in many ways profound literary artist. Christopher Ricks wrote: ‘The first question to ask about the poems of Stevie Smith is, can she possibly be as ingenuous as she sounds?’ Towards the end of this essay, having demonstrated with his usual prestidigitation and allusiveness Stevie Smith’s own ...”

“... on the Clapham omnibus as readers devoured the Pitman’s Advanced Shorthand version published (as Christopher Matthew reminds us) that year. Jerome would surely have relished such a spectacle; or would he have felt, as the Almighty may have thought when the Bible was first rendered into Pitman’s, that the finer elements of the text must inevitably be lost ...”

“... classes. Better transport and growing leisure made it possible for Londoners to take day-trips to Hampton Court or Cobham Hall and for the inhabitants of Birmingham and Manchester to visit such show houses as Eaton Hall, Alton Towers, Chatsworth, Hardwick, Haddon, Belvoir and Warwick Castle. Country-house tourism thrived in the mid-19th century, and in the ...”

“... seized him just before the Battle of Naseby.’In his rumbustious biography God’s Englishman, Christopher Hill diagnoses Cromwell as a manic depressive. When evaluating his performance in government, Hill, as a Marxist, was more plainspoken than some liberal historians, who tend to be mealy-mouthed and cower in the shadow of Thomas Carlyle and the Great ...”

“... confusion, a last gasp of flair in the Regency, after which came what the architectural historian Christopher Hussey described as ‘the great debacle of Victorianism’.That this view and these three centuries have come to stand for the essence of British architectural history is largely owed to one book, John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain ...”

“... on her past. Now, in the immediate postwar years, she is between systems. Now is Clough’s Little-hampton, Clough’s Stevenage and, worse for them both, the death of Christopher, their son. Haslam has this as ‘1945, killed at battle of Monte Cassino’, Jonah Jones as ‘in the protracted and bloody battle of Monte ...”