Search Results

“... save Venice, by protecting it from pollution and installing a new sewage system. Simultaneously, John Sparrow was also turning his attention to the plight of the stricken city. In one of his major letters to the Times, the then Warden of All Souls addressed the urgent question of Venetian dogshit. He noted with regret the inadequacy of the local decree which ...”

“... don’t see much more than roofs. To reach the front gates you take paths that angle up the ten-foot clay bank that was cut when the road was made. The land seems less stable than the timber-framed houses that sit like ships on a sea of clay and rotten rock that after a week of rain slides below them in slow motion. In the old days, after several wet weeks ...”

“... and their own duties seemed looser than in the ward below. But it was the presence of Roger and John, the two residents mentioned above, which accounted for most of the noise and disorder in the room itself. They also introduced a kind of comedy that was quite inseparable from the pathos of the position they were in. Roger, as I shall call him, a man in his ...”

“... vote, they will vote for the ruling party, because it represents the biggest tribe. And because, John Khumalo had explained to me, the president is the head of it. You should like to vote for that party, because the president is the most important man. You should not like to vote for other candidates, who are less important: what would be the use of ...”

“... it seems they will kill him so as to deny the regime an asset. A 12-year-old girl with a wounded foot and an ulcerated mouth guards Mallory, armed with a rusty Lee Enfield that is to figure talismanically throughout the subsequent story. Mallory tries to escape, and the girl pulls the trigger. At this point it is plausible to assume an Incident-at-Owl-Creek ...”

“... done an extraordinary job at investigating him when he was still a handsome youth of six foot two, with wavy hair and frank blue eyes, wholly uncertain of his talents, worried like other young men about his future, desperate for job opportunities. As confidence grows, it becomes clear he is an exceptionally able young man, however normal the ...”

“... island, he went with his son to a beauty spot with a famous lake, hired a boat, and caught a five-foot-long fish – this, he concluded, was a ‘good omen’ for the future (the word for ‘fish’ in Chinese is a homophone for the word meaning ‘abundance’). Chiang had squandered the abundance he once enjoyed on the mainland: half of his ...”

“... which called for very adroit reading. Ranter, a sequence from 1985, created another raiding, fleet-foot persona, ‘loping, running, retrieving’ through a landscape constructed out of North-East and Border landscapes and history. The persona of the Ranter was timely: he was a counter-historian, singing and reaving in tandem with academic projects like ...”

“... John Jones, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford, has written a number of good, idiosyncratic books on topics as diverse as Greek tragedy and Wordsworth, together with an excellent novel, The Same God, published in 1972 and apparently without a successor. He has now produced a good, idiosyncratic book on Shakespeare ...”

“... long-coveted rank as a Front Bench spokesman (on science) than he was dismissed by Michael Foot, then Labour leader, because of his opposition to the despatch of the Falklands task force. Much of the anger in John Silkin’s posthumously published book is directed against Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Labour’s internal ...”

“... albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s ...”

“... sister Joanna (or Martha – the name is in doubt) were the youngest of ten daughters of the late John Taaffe of Smarmore Castle, Co. Louth. At the ages of 26 and 30 respectively, they have been despatched to Rome by the current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord ...”

“... lines are static where Shakespeare’s are dynamic. There is an ambulant feel, eyes down, one foot placed in front of the other, deliberately. In Shakespeare, even at his most clotted, his eyes and his mind, like those of a runner are set well ahead of his feet. Many poets work sometimes in one mode, sometimes in the other. The parts of The Waste Land ...”

“... John​ Partridge’s The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits, and Hidden Secretes (1573) offers, to modern eyes, a bafflingly eclectic collection of what could loosely be called recipes, in the early modern sense of receipts, or texts received: ‘Fine Sauce for a roasted Rabbet: used to king Henry the eight’; ‘To comfort the heart, and take away Melancholy’; ‘To make red sealing Waxe’; ‘Marmalad of Quinces’; ‘To make Oile of Earth wormes … good for the sinews that are cold’; ‘To bake a Capon with yolks of Eggs’; ‘To know whether a Woman shall ever conceive or no’; ‘A Fumigation for a Presse, and clothes that no Moth shall breed therin’; ‘To heale leaperie faces, great swollen legs, or inflamed hands’; ‘A perfect way to cure the loathsome disease of the French Pockes ...”

“... a chilling subject-matter fixed with a steady eye, The Witches of Eastwick through the potency of John Updike’s imaginative release. On the Perimeter records what Caroline Blackwood found at Greenham Common and in the town of Newbury, when she visited the nuclear protest encampments there in March this year, shortly before the town council attempted to ...”