Search Results

“... In one respect at least we must be glad Jane Austen refused the proposal of marriage made her in 1802. Literature would be a little less seemly had she obliged us to think of our greatest (indeed, I more and more suspect, the greatest) novelist as Jane Bigg-Wither. Her invention was more euphonious. Trying, in 1809, to recover the novel that a publisher had bought for £10 and sat on, unpublished, for six years (one of the lessons of the Letters is that nothing changes in the book trade), she asked for the manuscript to be returned to her as ‘Mrs Ashton Dennis ...”

“... The nostalgic tendency of Victorian readers did not disappear altogether, though. For R.W. Chapman – editor of the first authoritative edition of the novels in 1923 – it was reshaped into what Johnson describes as ‘philologically oriented conservatism’. The eccentricity remained: stationed in Macedonia during the First World War, ...”

“... in subterranean caves’. Perhaps it was the common ground with Northanger Abbey that made R.W. Chapman turn to Peacock after completing his uniform Austen of 1923, though his efforts yielded only an Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Misfortunes of Elphin, with Crotchet Castle as a makeweight. In his meticulous edition, part of the complete novels ...”

“... In December 1940, Ben Macintyre’s anti-hero, Eddie Chapman, was in jail in Jersey – he already had a long record, including everything from safe-breaking to blackmail – when the Nazi occupiers threw a young hotel dishwasher, Tony Faramus, into the same jail; Faramus became Chapman’s cellmate and friend ...”

“... in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are known to exist today, and many only in Cassandra-mangled form. Deirdre Le Faye, editor of the excellent new revised Oxford edition of the letters, defends ...”

“... Jane Austen was that of an educated man of the world who had read Marx and Freud rather than R.W. Chapman and Mary Lascelles, and it proposed an alternative both to the old-style Brahmins and to the new-style technocrats of American graduate schools. Edmund Wilson, who in his maturity became a more pugnacious personality than Trilling ever was, maintained a ...”

“... its citizens that the KGB exists and who the head of it is. It is on this crazy situation that Chapman Pincher has built his entire career. Since he is extremely right-wing, and willing to swallow even the most ridiculous claptrap in the furtherance of the Anti-Communist Cause, Pincher at least has some access to the officers of MI5 – for in practice the ...”

“... of comradeship with one another, but because many of them liked it; they wanted to fight. To Guy Chapman war was ‘a mistress – once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other’. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of discovering within oneself ‘an underlying stream of clarity, energy and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere in ordinary life’. As ...”