Search Results

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”

“... Like the Jantzen girl advert, it was the ordinary person’s dream of utopia. More recently, David Hockney’s scenes, and Alex Colville’s wonderful flock of schoolgirls diving in to begin a race, give, as it were, the view of the painter. Tennessee Williams, a fanatical swimming pool man, wrote about diving in Sweet Bird of Youth, and contributed a ...”

“... her a wonderful massage, and instantly transforms her from sex object to sensuous liberated woman. David Kunzle challenged this narrative in Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of Corsets, Tight Lacing and Other Forms of Body Sculpture in the West (1982), arguing that the dangers of corsets were exaggerated or even invented. Women, he claimed, wore corsets ...”

“... and at least one portrait in stumpwork. His style eventually became so recognisable that Craig Brown suggested his entire face, glasses, nose and moustache, could be bought in one piece from joke shops. His character turned out to be more difficult to get right. Having overcome crippling nerves, Strong discovered that he could ‘give delight’ as a ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... he moved badly; he was no athlete, hated having to get up on a horse, and had, according to Ivor Brown, ‘the most meaningless legs imaginable’. He had to conquer, and succeeded completely in doing so, his early tendency to shyness, self-consciousness and laziness. He was proud of his voice, perhaps occasionally too much in love with it, especially in ...”

“... run for many years but, when investigated, turned out to have a fair complexion, her hair merely brown. But there is no definite decision. ‘It is best to leave the Dark Lady anonymous, even composite.’ Burgess was writing before A.L. Rowse, exercising his superior historical method and unmatched intellect, announced that she was incontrovertibly Emilia ...”

“... travel. It is the internal passport, an instrument of state control like the identity cards that David Blunkett is planning for us. Until 2002 it recorded not only your name, age and address, but your ‘nationality’ as well. Our word ‘Russian’ does duty for two distinct adjectives, rossiski and russki. The Russian Federation, like the Russian Academy ...”

“... sand was littered with clothing. I made an inventory: a pair of women’s trousers; two dresses; a brown sock; a bar of soap; a plastic sandal; a pair of trousers for a small boy beside a black T-shirt the same size; a packet of tampons; a plastic bag containing white granules like coarse salt, with instructions in French; a liquid soap dispenser; three pairs ...”

“... court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the Fieldings’ house and across the road from the Brown Bear, which became, as Beattie puts it, ‘a lock-up as well as a hang-out’ for the runners. They were expected to be ready to act at very short notice and most of them lived very near the court in the streets around Covent Garden, but hung out, when on ...”

“... Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory whips’ office ...”

“... married Churchill some thought that Venetia and Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping ...”

“... The ‘Caucasian variety’, by which he meant Europeans, were ‘colour white, cheeks rosy; hair brown or chestnut-coloured; head subglobular; face oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small’. Like many of his scientific contemporaries (there were a dozen competing taxonomies in Blumenbach’s ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”