Search Results

“... An indication of the prevailing climate within MI5 is given by the fact that it was in 1975 that Michael Bettaney (later jailed for trying, unsuccessfully, to sell secrets to the KGB) was recruited. What is usually forgotten in the Pincheresque version of events is that Bettaney was a deeply unstable young man, committed to the extreme Right. Having failed ...”

“... scorned only for his unrelieved vulgarity. The reaction to him wasn’t the antique snobbery Edith Wharton dissected in her society novels, but the worldly perspicacity of New Yorkers high and low. Trump’s quest for respectability only deepened his problems. It wasn’t that he had missed his moment like the passive Newland Archer in The Age of ...”

“... for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running lament for the ...”

“... without ever being great himself.’ On Howells’s successor in the genteel tradition: ‘Edith Wharton’s great subject should have been the biography of her own class, for her education and training had given her alone in her literary generation the best access to it. But the very significance of that education was her inability to transcend and use ...”

“... picked from the gardens of Newstead Abbey. ‘Iris Origo, like Byron, was soaked in Italy,’ said Michael Foot, who cited her book as the inspiration for his own writings about the poet. The comment is apposite also for The Merchant of Prato, which is steeped in the landscape and culture of Tuscany as much as in a particular period of its history. Though she ...”

“... and recognition for the clockmaker. The emotional tension of those chapters recalls Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. It never feels quite right to be most attached to a writer’s most famous work. But there’s something private and swift about Longitude. The Glass Universe has a more dutiful energy to it. Sobel’s other books include Galileo’s Daughter ...”