Search Results

“... to Vassar, scene of her most commercially successful novel, The Group. After Vassar, she married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring theatrical writer/director; wrote her first pieces for The Nation; underwent the break-up of the marriage; met the Partisan Review people; met Edmund Wilson; and married him. ‘He did not smoke, but after a long and arduous ...”

“... since it provides the only tenuous link among these people. The most officious of the strangers, Harold Chapman (a Docklands property-dealer in his other life) is approached for money with vague menaces by a local peasant family who own a crumbling wall that’s threatening to block the way, and he in turn approaches his various neighbours. So it’s a plot ...”

“... sense of mischief; a romantic temperament which enabled him to enjoy a number of undemanding love affairs; a fellowship of All Souls and, at the age of only 45, the Wardenship. Perhaps this last was the trouble, ‘OUR THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU DURING THIS TRYING TIME. JOHN AND PENELOPE’ read his telegram from the Betjemans when he was elected. Or perhaps ...”

“... at the highest level and are lucky enough to be able to produce an endless stream. We would dearly love to produce bowlers like these, but climate, pitches, the structure of the game, and genetics, are all against it. The lengths we will go to in our quest are illustrated by Woodcock’s mention of a sponsored find-a-fast-bowler competition last year, the ...”

“... could cram from head office cuttings files on the flight out. A British angle is the line editors love the most. Yet strangely no one mentioned the UK’s active encouragement of the massacres of between half a million and a million people which brought Suharto to power in the Sixties. Reporters did not need to go to the Public Record Office to find evidence ...”

“... by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime minister wasn’t inclined to believe the accusations. It turned out that Frolik had never actually met Stonehouse, and there was no evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. In his ...”

“... was concerned, when Harald harðræði, the giant King of Norway, was killed by his namesake Harold Godwinsson at Stamford Bridge, on 25 September 1066, just 19 days before the Battle of Hastings. In between Lindisfarne and Stamford Bridge, somewhere round the year 870, Iceland was discovered and settled by Scandinavians – according a later account by ...”

“... admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough Whitlam. There is, though, a psychological and temperamental unity, a commitment to a ‘radicalism’ that forms a thread between his ...”

“... English and Irish ones anyway? Samuel Beckett represented his university against Northants. Harold Pinter, who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in ...”

“... he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far ...”

“... was of great interest to me. I am not a linguist, I am not a scholar by nature or inclination; I love reading and writing and practising psychoanalysis but I have never done anything that looks like what people call research. I have also always admired the Strachey translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the ...”

“... for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really worried the patient. Had he not just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a ...”

“... to hounds by tube, dressed in full hunting pink, amid somewhat bemused workmen. Though he shared a love of poetry with Powell, Macleod was appalled at the idea of early rising, let alone hunting – his life was one of late nights, pretty women, and heavy smoking and drinking over the card table. Later on, boring government meetings would be spent writing ...”

“... never strident. What she does seem, on this evidence, is a bit unreal. Continually and chastely in love with the one man while he and all around her are successively consumed by more or less ephemeral passions, she is starring in a play by Shaw while everybody else is in a play by Schnitzler. The libidinous cyclone of which she has perennially functioned as ...”

“... and ‘California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt’. He fell in love with Samori’s mother, a young woman from Chicago, and befriended a handsome doctor’s son called Prince Jones, whose untimely death at the hands of the police functions as the moral fulcrum of the book. Coates then writes of his early years of struggle as ...”