Search Results

“... who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... But probably even the Japanese kamikaze pilots felt they were just doing a job, at least when they took off. Hynes describes one such attack, shortly before the war ended.   The whole lasted perhaps fifteen minutes. We were excited by it – perhaps entertained is a more precise word – it was a spectacle, like a son et lumière, with ...”

“... between O’Connell and Parnell saw the creation, in fitful stages, of an Irish electorate which took to the practice of voting with as much gusto as it had previously engaged in riot and rebellion, but without ever actually abandoning such tactics. The traditional irredentist belief that when peaceful means do not secure the redress of grievances rapidly ...”

“... observe that Acmeism, the literary movement which he helped to found in 1910 in St Petersburg, took as the inspiration for its poetry the whole European cultural tradition. The particular ideas and ideals to which Mandelstam was referring, though naturally associated with pan-European Jewish culture, are just as much a part of the best German and Russian ...”

“... her first love. She was not yet 18 when Gabriel’s friend and fellow art student James Collinson took an interest in her. A quiet, meek little chap from a philistine Midlands family, he was to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for a while, hover between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and paint rather good genre pictures, the chief of which, St Elizabeth of ...”

“... thirty, after the painful break-up of a love affair, he disposed of his few personal possessions, took the necessary vow of poverty and resolved to be a writer. He moved from Suffolk to Earlsfield in South-West London to live ‘above a small shop on Garratt Lane that had been by turns an outlet for oversized naughty clothes for transvestites, a West Indian ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style ...”

“... anything that can be done,’ he would say. I have a multitude of notes from Mr Silvers (it took me years to stop calling him that) but I find they are not in the filing cabinet with all the other letters and notes; they are in the books on my shelves. He had a knack of making you feel that the thing that might be done could only be done by you. ‘You ...”

“... Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s lower depths, where they often walked all night, deploring the hypocrisy of high society and the crimes of the government: much as a couple of useful friends might be doing today. His ...”

“... like the Mona Lisa’s. When he first appeared, in the novella A Study in Scarlet in 1887, no one took much notice. But when Arthur Conan Doyle repackaged Holmes and Watson in short stories for the Strand Magazine, the trifle improvised for pin money by a struggling young doctor soon turned into an apotheosis that bemused, enriched and finally exasperated ...”

“... 1611 spelling, ornamental capitals beginning each chapter, a detailed map of Palestine engraved by John Speed (whose maps of English counties were selling so well at the time), a calendar of Church of England holy days and lessons for church services, and, strangest of all, 34 meticulously referenced genealogical tables of biblical characters culminating in ...”

“... which is not wholly evil. Yevtushenko is not evil, though he did well in an evil system: he took care of number one, but he also had some care for others. Few, in the moral vacuum which Communism encouraged, could say as much – a tragedy which the people of the Soviet Union are now having to live through. He can be pompous and defensive about ...”

“... of the Will’, ‘The Nature of Mind and Its Relation to Cerebral Activity’. Women especially took to Bergson, and in such numbers that displaced students complained at being unable to get into the lecture-hall, asking that the too popular professor should move to somewhere more spacious, the Paris Opéra perhaps. When, in 1914, he was elected to the ...”

“... this was true or not in Pinter’s case, though I was with him once in the Café Anglais when he took exception to the waiter’s way of speaking. PINTER: I’ll have the fish toast with the parmesan custard. WAITER: No problem. PINTER: I wasn’t anticipating one. But back to the buses. There’s been a change in the way people speak as they roll ...”