Search Results

“... in Shakespearean associations, invisible but well attested. Down an alleyway running south off Carter Lane lies New Bell Yard. Now dominated by the glass-fronted atrium of the Grange St Paul’s Hotel, this was formerly the site of the Bell Inn. In the 1590s its landlady was a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a Stratford ...”

“... success. She was ambitious for literary fame, and adored the theatre. Bouncy and excitable – Anne Stott describes her at the age of 18 as ‘a practised and persistent attention-seeker’ – she wrote pastoral verse drama for performance by schoolgirls and helped produce plays at Bristol’s Theatre Royal, but her sights were set on London. Quite how ...”

“... sarcophagus which had contained his remains for five centuries until Elton, as if playing Howard Carter in the Public Record Office, excitedly opened it in 1947. But most followed Elton in attributing credit, discredit and, generally, responsibility for what happened in Henry’s reign to others, the politicians, courtiers and prelates who either contributed ...”

“... Pope made his print debut in the 1709 miscellany, which also contained work by rising names like Anne Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast reflected glory on his vernacular list. When an ambitious Oxford graduate called Basil Kennett told Tonson in ...”

“... writer was banned after Lee Dunne in 1976, though books by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Angela Carter were banned in the 1980s, which is strange, because that’s when I read them all. In 1979 information about contraception became legal, though you couldn’t legally buy condoms without a prescription until 1985. Ten years later, it became legal to ...”

“... to his wife. I do not believe it bears that meaning at all. Disraeli obviously had a row with Mary Anne, spent a night elsewhere, lied about his destination and squared his sister about his whereabouts. ‘I am rather confused and shaky,’ he writes, ‘having had a bad night in a strange bed.’ The suggestion that he was sleeping with some unnamed lady or ...”

“... in the plot. Ackroyd’s double-track narrative switches between London in the period of the Queen Anne churches (say 1714 to 1715, though the building process is telescoped) and the city of today. Across the divide of idiom and landscape, there is a parallelism of event: murders committed in identical places – around the site of Hawksmoor churches, in ...”

“... that I never knew about Colette when I was younger. The Chalet School, yes, What Katy Did and Anne of Green Gables; Enid Blyton after Enid Blyton, Upper Fourth at Malory Towers, Claudine at St Clare’s … Claudine, as happier readers will know, is the name Colette gave the free-spirited authorial stand-in of the four novels she ghosted for M. Willy ...”

“... the lake.’ I don’t give a fig where I face – I’d face the drainpipe ... He tracks down Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth – whose love duets from the classics delighted radio listeners – to a cottage near Colwyn Bay. ‘Those are by my mother,’ said Anne Ziegler, ‘That’s one thing I’ve always longed to ...”

“... a page defining quotation-marks). But at least Hexter chews vigorously on his rubber bone: Charles Carter, in contrast, takes a serious subject – the Spanish Ambassador Sarmiento’s successful protection of troublesome recusants under James I – and handles it frivolously. Finally, Mortimer Levine contrives to sink a self-evident truth – that women ...”

“... of clothes and manners, foods and amusements of society than the perpetual political crises’. Anne de Courcy’s Margot at War is lighter in tone and lacks scholarly pretensions or apparatus. But it conveys Margot’s milieu with a nice touch and takes time away from this enclosed self-regarding world to give us vivid and sharp vignettes of the harder ...”

“... farm gate, with a cold whiteness in the Kent sky that darkened quickly in the afternoon. Ian and Anne Carter were sitting in the drawing-room of their farmhouse. She is a Justice of the Peace, groomed to a fine point of civic order, wearing a blue suit with a poppy pinned to its lapel. She is well-spoken, opening up her world in good clear Southern ...”

“... 1933 he directed the Harvard Classical Club’s production of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Elliott Carter wrote the incidental music. The title role was taken by Robert Fitzgerald, who would go on to translate both Homer and Sophocles into English. (He remembered Parry sitting at the back of the hall, ‘laughing at the abominable acting’.) Three months ...”

“... Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays ...”

“... publishing house were girls with names, double and triple barrelled: Heathcote-Amery, Bonham-Carter, Sackville-West, Vane-Tempest-Stewart. And mostly their forenames ended, as well-bred girls’ forenames must, in ‘a’: Nigella, Cosima, Candida, Sophia, Samantha, Sabrina, Lucinda. ‘Famous Englishmen write to me about their daughters,’ Attallah ...”