Search Results

“... This is not a moving account of how bravely and cleverly Ivan Vaughan copes with a debilitating disease: its scope is far wider, and its tone more varied, and more demanding of the reader, than that would suggest. Part of it is an adventure story about someone in extraordinary physical circumstances, for whom execution of the most mundane acts (such as putting on spectacles, opening a letter) attains a level of cliff-hanging suspense ...”

“... 19th-century social history, but it is carefully shaped to fit in with the neighbouring pieces. Jane Rogers’s fourth novel is full of information about the harshness of the Industrial Revolution, the plight of the weavers and spinners, and the fight against the Combination Acts. Through the device of a character who was reared in Owenite circles, we ...”

“... squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the love ...”

“... Cities that are beautiful, safe and equitable are within our grasp.’ So says Richard Rogers at the end of this reworking of his Reith Lectures of 1995, and we must do our best to believe him. Suppose, however, that the lecturer had pronounced instead on another of the basic building-blocks of society – the family, for instance ...”

“... feel so ghastly.’ Charles and Philip are touched in more lightly, but they are real enough. Like Jane Austen, Alice Thomas Ellis can describe women’s lives so well because she understands men perfectly. More prominent in the story is Sylvie’s daughter, who is notionally reading Greats but actually trying to win a prize for romantic fiction. Evvie has ...”

“... difficulties start with her struggle to locate the material. Her ‘100 good women writers before Jane Austen’ are an arbitrary bunch, many obtained from a hacker’s job on Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800. Spender calls this a ‘Dictionary of Women Novelists’ – a significant blunder. Todd covers ...”

“... The editorial line is anti-suburb, anti-car, pro-bike, pro-coffee, pro-affordable housing, pro-Jane Jacobs. Although Florida’s position hasn’t fundamentally altered, he has become worried that cities are increasingly implicated in inequality. It’s true that they are engines of invention, prosperity and opportunity, and that without them our economies ...”

“... and mother, looms large, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The introduction is written by Jane Ewart-Biggs. Lady Ewart-Biggs speaks for those throughout the country who listened with growing dismay to the debate in Parliament on 3 April 1982 which culminated in the despatch of the Task Force with all-party support. Those people thought in terms of men ...”

“... of station in life, but less successfully. The play of snobbery and moral nuance here might recall Jane Austen – were it not for the impending tragedy of Colley. Talbot has occasion both to ridicule and enlarge his own conceptions of hierarchy at the ritual of ‘shooting the sun’ – the officers with ‘the brass triangles held to their faces’ and the ...”

“... nothing, of Shakespeare but his writings; and that he thanked God Almighty that he knew nothing of Jane Austen, and that there were no letters preserved either of Shakespeare’s or of Jane Austen’s, that they had not been ripped open like pigs.’ The reappearance of the porky metaphor may indicate a family habit of ...”

“... to his cabin. Colley emerges, drunk and naked but for a seaman’s shirt, supported by Billy Rogers the Handsome Sailor: he pisses against the bulwark in full view of the genteel passengers, and then turning he blesses them in the name of the Trinity. He is removed. Talbot sees him once more, still extremely drunk and happy, on the way to the lavatory ...”

“... the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys ...”

“... than men do. Other things being equal, readers of the same sex will be closer to the meaning of Jane Austen, for instance, than their male counterparts. Where there is a choice, women’s commentary is given priority in the attached bibliographical notes. They know best. This Companion is at least two things. Primarily it is a reference book, a convenient ...”

“... of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... be happy to do the honours.’ When June checks into Room 6 at the Moonstone, under the name of Jane, as if in her depleted state she can only undertake the labour of changing a single letter, Cissy starts looking after her without a word. Their lives have come close to overlapping, with barely a single degree of separation between them, and June’s ...”