Search Results

“... you can forgive me for having my suspicions. It was that kind of year. When​ I finally turned to Todd Miller’s Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security, the mid-term elections were approaching and Trump had dispatched US troops to the Mexican border to repel a caravan of hungry asylum-seekers from Central America. In the ...”

“... the waist-line ought to be, and whether hats have wings.”’ Vogue’s first editor, Dorothy Todd, was indifferent to fashion, a tradition Brogue editors have, for the most part, happily upheld. Her tendencies lay avant-gardewards; sufficiently so that Nast got jittery and shipped her off to New York to learn publishing his way before she’d even begun ...”

“... momentous events is a familiar move in Boyd’s fiction. In The New Confessions (1987), John James Todd, a Scottish filmmaker, fights in the trenches, is pauperised by the Wall Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any ...”

“... describe Garland’s stone-butch girlfriend of the 1920s, the hatchet-faced Dorothy (‘Dody’) Todd, pioneering editor of British Vogue and a heroic if sloppy dipsomaniac, as ‘the bucket in the well of loneliness’. * Enchanting tidbits like this last are everywhere in All We Know. (It might be subtitled And Then Some.) But the author is most animated ...”

“... social freedom, the ability to change identities and create new selves, ends – from Daisy Miller to Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl – in confinement. Against all the evidence, Ellison proposed that James had grasped the basis of that paradox in white freedom and black servitude. Although there may seem to be nothing amusing about this racial ...”

“... and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of midnight ...”