Search Results

“... early life. ‘I believe no Man in the World was ever the Peoples King more than his present Majesty,’ Defoe wrote in 1697. His devotion to William spurred him to write The True-Born Englishman (1701), the work that, as Furbank and Owens put it with understandable hyperbole, ‘rocketed him to fame’. It was a scornful rejoinder to attacks on the king ...”

“... ages is like a fable, which on its way has the power to burst into flame. In the name of its awful majesty I will go down with willing torments into the grave.   I will go down, and rise again on the third day, and as boats float on the river, the centuries like a caravan of barges shall float out of the darkness to me for judgment. In representing Christ ...”

“... Benjamin from Walter Brennan. Fascinated by Greta Garbo (‘I wanted to be Garbo,’ she wrote in her diary), Sontag managed to fashion a Garboesque mystique while carrying out the garrulous duties of a public intellectual for decades: speeches, interviews, conferences, symposia, all that gab. For much of its long, eventful haul, Moser’s Life resembles a ...”

“... calls the root word – in this case, look – a ‘key word’, and registers it at the end of her commentary on each sonnet. The couplet tie which she also prints at the end of each commentary, of course contains the key word. So far so necessarily technical, but let us see how it applies in practice in her discussion ...”

“... June 1764: Commodore John Byron sets sail in HMS Dolphin, HMS Tamar accompanying, to visit ‘His Majesty’s Islands call’d Falkland’s and Pepys ‘Islands situate in the Atlantick Ocean near The Streights of Magellan in order to make better surveys thereof, than had yet been made, and to determine a place or places, most proper for a new settlement or ...”

“... had hidden under the sofa. A Jeeves before his time, Manners imperturbably laid a place for His Majesty on the carpet and put down the plate. He was retiring discreetly when the King said (still sous bergère), ‘That was very good … Manners.’ The pun was thought to signal a further stage in the King’s recovery. The anecdote hasn’t found its way ...”

“... to lines by Goethe, which his mother often quoted, ‘written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him’, as though it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for Carlyle to have given a book to his mother. But the most significant passage comes shortly after he has been given the news of ...”

“... bent on preserving heroic dignity even in defilement, as in Pope’s ‘Slow rose a form, in majesty of Mud.’ Oldham’s nearest Augustan analogue is in Swift, who declined the ‘lofty Stile’ and the elevations of mock-heroic, and whose aggrandisements, like Oldham’s, tended to unruly forms: Rabelaisian enumerations, hyperbolic extermination ...”

“... by section 9(3), which provided that the Act was to ‘continue in force until such date as His Majesty may by Order in Council declare to be the date on which the emergency that was the occasion of the passing of this Act came to an end, and shall then expire’. The Act gave the executive wide powers to regulate exports without any Parliamentary ...”

“... its masthead: ‘Printed for and sold by DANIEL ISAAC EATON, Printer and Bookseller to the Supreme Majesty of the People, at the COCK and SWINE, No 74, Newgate Street’. But the third and fourth numbers (30 March and 6 April) carry on their last page a pointing finger and the advice: ‘Those who wish to promote the PHILANTHROPIST, by their assistance, will ...”

“... bring in a goddess among the characters: it revolts me. Then not unnaturally, as it seemed to me, her speech is the worst in the play: being an unreality she must talk unreal. Believe me, the Greek gods are a totally unworkable material; the merest frigidity, which must chill and kill every living work of art they are brought into… . [They ...”

“... statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put it, ‘and a new country’. This was not, he said, another of ...”

“... our poising of obscure desires, What Minotaur in irritable matched burnings Yearns and shall gore her intricate my fires. Haffenden has some useful remarks on the poems, not unlike those of the Granta reviewer on the play: they try to solve the contradictions between the world of science and the feeling of being human; in the circumstances of the late ...”

“... Anglicano Defensio Secunda, or Second Defence of the English People, which Barbara Lewalski, in her biography, oddly calls his ‘least attractive work’, Milton gives thanks to God chiefly for three reasons. The first, in George Burnett’s 1809 translation, is that I was born in those times of my country, when the effulgent virtue of its citizens ...”

“... no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the pubs closed on Good Friday in 1904, under the ...”