Search Results

“... his father. Even plays were dangerous: the bolt from Heaven intended to spark the conversion of St Paul set fire to the actor’s trousers; the wicked son of Haman was almost hanged in the course of a performance of the story of Esther. And if you survived one hazard, it would not be long until the next one. A mason employed to dig a well for Thomas in the ...”

“... people believed in witches and fairies, then why not also in the Stuarts as divine right monarchs? Paul Monod’s Jacobitism and the English People 1688-1788 (1989) established the importance of Jacobite allegiance within English political culture. It was no longer convincing to depict Jacobitism as an anachronism which, while capable of enchanting the ...”

“... congers, a contemporary alleged, because ‘as a large conger eel is said to devour the small fry, so this united body overpowers young and single traders.’ But sometimes the single traders bit back, and Curll’s great skill was to operate as both predator and parasite, always for his own purposes, though often in short-term tactical alliances that ...”

“... the belly’ to avoid execution) at the cost of sixpence. When the Quaker penal reformer Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate in 1813, she found three hundred women detained in a space designed for fifty, crammed together regardless of age or offence. By contrast, the new Victorian houses of correction discouraged idleness and tried to induce reflection. In the early ...”

“... him: like the other two women who are the subject of Ruth Butler’s new book – Hortense Fiquet (Paul Cézanne) and Rose Beuret (Auguste Rodin) – Doncieux was first the artist’s mistress and later his wife. Hiring a model cost a minimum of one franc an hour; painting the woman who already shared your bed was clearly the cheaper alternative. Though both ...”

“... to realise the standards of free men. ‘Whoever goes into Greece at present should do it as Mrs Fry went into Newgate – not in the expectation of meeting with any especial indication of existing probity – but in the hope that time and better treatment will reclaim the present burglarious and larcenous tendencies which have followed this General Gaol ...”

“... differences. Consider, for example, the two best English painters of the Eighties generation – Paul Nash and Lewis. In their early careers there are some remarkable resemblances: in both cases public school was followed by study at the Slade, early recognition by older artists, exhibitions (they were both represented in the ‘English Post-Impressionists ...”

“... Academy was a grudging discretion. Ten years was deemed a decent enough interval in the case of Paul Morand, for example, whose ‘role during the last war’ led to the defeat of his candidacy in 1958: in 1968 he was duly elected to the Academy. The Academy’s refusal of all attempts at reform and renewal has not done it much good: today it is seen by ...”

“... And so, as she pores over Virginia Woolf’s posthumous reinterpretation of her friend Roger Fry and Evelyn Waugh’s thoughts about Rossetti, she notes Eliot’s essay on Kipling, published just after ‘East Coker’. The author of Puck of Pook’s Hill was ‘another literary exile who had sought out an English home and taken possession of it in his ...”

“... for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its experiments with cropping ...”

“... games’ (Breton’s presence at the Villa attracted the Deux Magots crowd of a Sunday). Varian Fry remembered a ‘dyspeptic but keen-minded old Bolshevik . . . At the house he talked for hours about his experiences in Russian prisons . . . or discussed the ramifications and interrelations of the European secret police . . . Listening to him was like ...”

“... cannibalistic practices of rank and file Ulster Unionists. In a variant on the traditional Ulster fry-up – and Swift’s Modest Proposal – Wharton described Dreadberg’s cameras secretly filming the sautéeing of children, their screams muffled by the sinister beat of Lambeg drums. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland continues to ...”

“... immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs of the Thames Gateway, of a triumphalist police outing, a reunion for veterans of the Battle of Orgreave. A reunion attended, in true British fashion, by a ...”

“... term. The incidental detail (smog in Beijing, conflict in Syria, the growing fashion for ‘vocal fry’ among women, the popularity of luggage with four wheels rather than two) is satisfactorily contemporary, but the human particulars are either missing or unconvincing. If Trudy is 28 at the time of the novel’s setting, and Nutshell-Hamlet can reasonably ...”

“... the hillside and are spreading over the lower meadow. Yes, the hill is coming down with hazel, as Paul Muldoon says. I’ve brought a bow saw with me and I begin cutting away some of the tall wands. Should I be disturbing this place? In among the stones, as I lift them, are a few large torpid worms which I put in the shopping bag I’ve brought. There’s a ...”