Search Results

“... offers a panoramic view of Johannesburg, where an ape-like animal is at large in the suburbs. Young Stanley snaps it with his camera, a barmitzvah present. The picture is printed in a newspaper; an elderly estate agent’s wife welcomes the headlines as a distraction from worse horrors. Doctors at the golf club are convinced it is a baboon. It startles a ...”

“... e morto.’ The infamous Count Cenci was dead. His body was lying in what was called the ‘warren’, a dense patch of scrub below the castle rock which was used as a refuse tip. It appeared he had fallen from the wooden balcony that ran around the upper storey of the castle. There was a drop of six canne (about thirteen metres) into the ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1942, Elisabeth Young, a diplomat’s wife living in Surrey, began keeping a ‘register’ of eggs. Each day, she recorded the date and number of eggs laid by her flock of 12 hens, sometimes logging the name of the particular hen who had laid it. She noted whether the eggs were brown or white or ‘brownish’ and any that were double-yolked ...”

“... they will almost certainly cross that boundary, but until it is crossed, it is possible for the young and middle-aged to regard the old as if oldness is their essential nature. It isn’t a lack of compassion; after all, for the not-elderly, the elderly are their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Partly it’s a problem of scale. Your mother ...”

“... Oxford has ever since lived in fear of another. In the new era Magdalen was headed by Herbert Warren, a man bursting with all the energy, self-belief and ambition of the imperialist Victorian. He was also a hearty and a snob, who did all he could to recruit aristocrats and muscular Christians. Among his prize captures were Prince Chichibu of Japan and ...”

“... needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may be yet more complex than his seven hundred pages allow for, since he reads neither Chinese nor Tibetan, and depends for the most part on ...”

“... are present in the title of Amit Chaudhuri’s intelligent and funny new novel, which follows a young Bengali man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by Homer, ‘noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without ...”

“... mother and as owning a ‘preponderantly masculine’ intellect. At the age of 36 she fell for a young woman with a face like a sulky choirboy, and relaxed into a lifelong partnership, explaining: ‘I lean more and more on her trousers.’ Claire Harman has written a bright and freshly-expressed biography, which is full of interesting ...”

“... in Room at the Top, but more convivial and amused – an amiable shark. No one looks that eagerly young anymore. Two decades after his death, Tynan is still getting the star treatment, a rare thing for any writer; even rarer for a critic, whose work tends to date fast. The morbid, sexy idolatry usually reserved for rock stars, dead poets and suicide blondes ...”

“... and moved with his family to England at the age of eight. After a miserable period at Harrow, the young Sheridan settled with his family at Bath, where his father attempted to set up a Rhetorical and Grammatical Academy. Here Sheridan met Eliza Linley, rescued her from the unwelcome attentions of a soi-disant army captain, and eloped with her to France. On ...”

“... manicured lawn and quarry so wafer thin?’ The ‘quarry’ referred to here is a nightmarish warren into which Sydney’s underclass has been driven: Hospital likes to describe it in terms of Dante’s hellish circles, its outer regions consisting of seedy pubs and bars, its innermost recesses taking the form of hideaways beneath railway tunnels and tube ...”

“... though, let us glance at an American clubman’s book, The World of P.G. Wodehouse by Herbert Warren Wind, a New Yorker writer, described on the blurb as ‘America’s most distinguished golf correspondent’. His book is a tribute, written in good American lapidary prose. We might have hoped for some account of Wodehouse’s relationship with golf: but ...”

“... are frequently written in awkward, clotted prose. ‘We were at each other’s throats,’ says a young Jewish woman in one of the stories, an assistant working in a Moscow bookshop whose attempts to emigrate to Australia have led to family break-down: ‘The walls moved closer in to each other and every shout set off in each of us an unscheduled train of ...”

“... problem, it emerged, was to do with Tate’s complicated love-life. In his youth, as an ambitious young literary blade, Tate was known to have enjoyed some indiscretions (vide his ‘discovery’ of Laura Riding) but it was not until his later years – post-1940; he was born in 1899 – that he achieved Great Lover status. This randiness of Tate’s was ...”

“... Russia invaded in 2014 that these militia groups were the only thing holding the line, and the young activists knew it. Ukrainian society is now united by a hatred of Russia and by the collective efforts to win the war, but these divisions remain.When I was in Kharkiv last month, I caught up with a friend who spends every waking minute sourcing supplies ...”