Search Results

“... really there and not the painting. The row of buildings – now mostly hotels – that runs down Montague Street to the east of the museum is unchanged, the railings are the same, down to their gold tips, and though in the painting there’s no tree where a large plane tree ought to be, the scene looks just as it does now, in the thinnest light of the ...”

“... from one to the other, prompted by what he takes to be egregious violations of common sense. John Humphrys on the Today programme can be almost as angry but is more jocular, usually sounding as though he is just one more idiocy away from an uncontrollable guffaw. The interrogators are not all men – Emily Maitlis and Kirsty Wark on Newsnight, and Sarah ...”

“... steamships. ‘He drove his pen,’ Henry James said, ‘as steadily on the tumbling ocean as in Montague Square.’ Having once crossed the Atlantic in Trollope’s company, James recalled that though ‘the season was unpropitious, the vessel overcrowded, the voyage detestable … Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning for … communion with ...”

“... to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Local worthies sent reports to the bishop, John Trefnant, who processed through the diocese with a cadre of officials to investigate, judge and correct any troublesome behaviour. The visitation book, ‘an unsightly and tattered manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in ...”

“... ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or months of courtship, gift-giving and negotiation. John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk ...”

“... Mackenzie King and the Devil himself). He noticed that Oxford was haunted by that eerie scholar, Montague Summers, who dressed like a Mediterranean priest but was always accompanied on his afternoon walks ‘either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was supposed to be his secretary, or by a large black dog, but never by both. Tongues wagged.’ Such ...”

“... citing the suggestion that for South Africans ‘the rugby scrum was symbolic of the laager,’ John Nauright and Timothy Chandler enter the reservation that ‘such notions can be taken too far.’ Indeed they can. An inward-facing huddle of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a ...”

“... the dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they ...”

“... scholarly endeavours. It went all the way down. His friends thought him as sexless as an angel. Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) lived the unexamined life in spades, in the way that only an unmarried don of his generation could. The son of an Anglican vicar of evangelical inclinations, he won a scholarship to Eton, then another to Henry VI’s sister ...”

“... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...”

“... impatience with Romantic antiquarianism can be sensed in the Short History when he comments on John Montague’s poem about a group of old country neighbours: ‘Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.’ These old people, who inspire mixed feelings of tenderness and repugnance, are compared by the poet to a ‘standing circle of ...”

“... to, almost, the present day, each one made to stand for a particular type of donnish character: John Henry Newman (‘The Charismatic Don’); Maurice Bowra (‘The Don as Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme ...”

“... when he accused her of ‘sordid avarice, disdainful pride and ungovernable rage’. Mary Wortley Montague, who counted herself a friend, described Sarah as ‘eternally disappointed and eternally fretting’. Labels like ‘virago’ and ‘termagant’ may say as much about contemporary gender expectations as they do about the Duchess, but they are not ...”

“... Joseph Hotung Gallery is new only in name: it is the familiar Edward VII Gallery, designed by Sir John Burnet and opened by George V in 1914. It is a high-ceilinged room 360 feet in length, running along the north side of the first floor of the BM. Tall windows give onto sky and plane trees, with Montague Place and Senate ...”

“... are William Gaskill’s superb revivals of The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem, John Dexter’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Coward’s Hay Fever, Stoppard’s Jumpers, Clifford Williams’s all-male As you like it, and Olivier’s own productions of Three Sisters and Juno and the Paycock. All of those, I’m sure, were Tynan’s ...”