Search Results

“... and he would regale me with the details of the latest murder he had been called on to snap: ‘By, Alan, I’ve seen some stuff.’ The stuff he’d seen included the corpse of the stripper Mary Millington, who had committed suicide. ‘I can’t understand why she committed suicide. She had a lovely body.’ To someone as prone to embarrassment as I ...”

“... Yours ever,                               Alan Dear Kingsley, You are quite right about Aberdeen, and I was careless about him. I ought to have made his view clearer, and so incidentally ought Temperley at the end of his book on the Crimea. I think on the whole that I am right about Bright. He had a good ...”

“... as potentially progressive – a romantic attitude that would profoundly influence Lomax’s son Alan. Robinson’s dissonant ‘Abe Lincoln’ draws on Party Secretary Earl Browder’s notorious statement that Communism was 20th-century Americanism, but it was Robinson’s hymn-like music for ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’ – a celebration of ...”

“... books. Is Satan good or bad? Why exactly did Iago hatch his plot, or Isabel Archer decide to marry Gilbert Osmond? Such speculations need the exercise of just as much intelligence as does the higher jargon, and for most people they are more fun to make. Dr Spacks ends her preface with the comment that although the ambiguities and perplexities associated with ...”

“... whether we really need to know this much about Betjeman. Hillier acknowledges what, if Martin Gilbert had been a shade less thorough, might be a record number of helpers and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it his ...”

“... it is this reminds me of until Gerontius gets to ‘I will address him,’ and I realise it’s Gilbert and Sullivan, or Gilbert at any rate, the period of Newman’s poem roughly contemporary and the diction every bit as unintentionally arch as Gilbert’s is deliberately. It’s ...”

“... murderer). Diana, Broughton’s second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s stepmother, wife of the third Baron, who broke the news to Broughton that ‘Joss is wildly in love with Diana’). Plus a number of walk-on, climb-on or lie-down ...”

“... indifferent private press books – would not by themselves have warranted a book on the scale of Alan Crawford’s admirable biography. It is Ashbee’s attempts to give practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of ...”

“... pardonable,’ he said of that time. Snobbery was an even less sympathetic part of the story. When Gilbert Murray got him to write The Problems of Philosophy for the Home University Library, Russell referred to the assignment contemptuously, described it as a ‘shilling shocker’, said it was ‘philosophy for the Midwest’ and intended to enlighten shop ...”

“... Lord Quinton, when told that I was proposing to sign in, described it as ‘pure Gilbert and Sullivan’. Lord Annan told me that his wife calls it ‘Noel’s play-group’. Lord Adrian told me that I would find it like a prep school. And I remembered that years ago the late Lord Gage, whom Lord Briggs regards as a notably regrettable ...”

“... 1957 and she is 39 years old. After happening on Spark’s novel in proof while working on his own Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh has decided to write it a glowing testimonial, which he publishes in the Spectator: ‘It so happens that The Comforters came to me just as I had finished a story on a similar theme, and I was struck by how much more ambitious Miss ...”

“... self intact. ‘If you want to know the time ask a policeman’ becomes Ivy Compton-Burnett meets Gilbert Ryle. In philosophy I would find this kind of analysis arid and dispiriting. With Goffman it is different. Funny and perceptive though he is about forms – whether in talk, behaviour or social organisation – forms are never his central concern. In ...”

“... more familiar ground. They include David Riggs on Ben Jonson, Emma Smith on Thomas Middleton, Alan Nelson on Shakespeare’s patrons, John Astington on the Burbages, Bart van Es on the comedians Will Kemp and Robert Armin, and Paul Edmondson on the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell. It was decided to exclude writers who can’t ...”

“... into the New World. In the royal charter that Queen Elizabeth conferred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, she granted him full power over the soil of ‘those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida … to dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of the laws of ...”

“... whom he called ‘merchant venturers’ – besides, Hanson and Wilson were both very fond of Gilbert and Sullivan. Hanson was an obvious candidate for Wilson’s ‘lavender’ Honours List in 1976, when Wilson suddenly and mysteriously resigned as Premier. The list, written down by Wilson’s éminence grise, Marcia Williams, on her lavender-coloured ...”