Search Results

“... be borne in mind. If the intention is merely to entertain in an avowedly lightweight work, as in Penelope Lively’s Fanny and the Battle of Potter’s Piece, only a pedant would insist that it is always necessary to include glimpses of less pleasant aspects of the past as well. But although it is fun to read about Victorian family games in large ...”

“... The Kitchen God, surely one of the most irritating minor deities ever conceived, was once a rich farmer called Zhang, with a kind and patient wife. But he chased her out of the house, spent all his substance on another woman and reduced himself to beggary. Nearly at death’s door, he was carried into the kitchen of a charitable lady who took pity on the ...”

“... women’s right to financial and sexual independence, for the Boers against the British, the small farmer against the capitalist, the blacks (always ‘Kaffirs’ or ‘niggers’ to Olive) against the whites, she spent herself recklessly. All this was in the face of a chronic illness, apparently asthma, which is often said to be psychosomatic (though never by ...”

“... a time, before his business failed and he became a night watchman, her father was a fox and mink farmer. The climate was dramatic: winters were bitterly cold, and summers fiercely hot and pestilent. Munro was a pretty and precocious child who did recitations on the radio when she was three or four years old. A few years later, at school, she turned awkward ...”

“... right person. In 1913 Robert Frost arrived with his family from New Hampshire, unsuccessful as a farmer and not well known as a poet. George Thomas includes some of the first notes between them (‘My dear Frost – I wish you were nearer so that we could see one another easily with our children’) and after that, Frost said, ‘1914 was our year. I never ...”

“... account for what life did to her. Charlotte Mew was the third child (out of eight) of Fred Mew, a farmer’s son from the Isle of Wight, who had come to London to be trained as an architect by H.E. Kendall. In 1863 he married Kendall’s daughter, a tiny, silly woman who was ‘above’ him, and always made him feel so: he was made to describe his own ...”

“... Watching a good plot,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in the LRB (21 February 1980),is like watching something alive, or if it is adroit and sinuous enough, something struggling for life. Between the once-born and the twice-born plot (which makes the reader, even if he is reading it for the twentieth time, want to interfere at every stage), the difference, of course, is great ...”

“... his wife surrounded by gossip columnists. A year or so later he took off from Jocelyn Rickards for Penelope Gilliatt. Rickards, who expresses indulgence towards her lovers, reserves her main darts on this occasion for Gilliatt, who didn’t iron her dresses, cooked watery scrambled eggs and sent express letters daily to Osborne when he was holidaying with ...”

“... shows the power of fantasy to shape our experience of the world. In ‘Ithaca’, Glück’s Penelope dreams as she weaves. Her suitors have failed to realise that Odysseus is powerfully present in her memory: The beloved doesn’t need to live. The beloved lives in the head … He was the body and voice, the easy magnetism of a living man, and then ...”

“... were antecedents. Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of verse letters in the voices of such women as Penelope, Dido and Sappho, provided the basis for Chaucer’s own collection of women’s lives, The Legend of Good Women. The anonymous Old English elegies – The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament being the most famous – were meditations on loss and trauma ...”

“... Mayfair type of snob feeds on the lower nation whom it robs. How long is this going to last?’ A farmer in Yorkshire wrote to the BBC to protest that ‘with over forty years’ close contact with the working classes I am appalled at the accumulating and increasing interest taken by them in this swine’s broadcasting.’ Joyce’s biggest ...”