Search Results

“... Bête Noire’ is set in Piccadilly during the long winter between the Battle of Alamein and the Normandy invasion. At the time, the 24-year-old Douglas had pretty much recovered from wounds inflicted by German 88s in the Western Desert and by spring he was back in action. On 9 June, three days after landing in France, he was killed behind enemy lines ...”

“... elm I climb’d, with clasping legs.    To reach the crow’s high-nested eggs,      Come winter moss, creep on, creep on,      And warn me of the time that’s gone. Or where I found thy yellow bed Below the hill-borne fir-tree’s head, And heard the whistling east wind blow Above, while wood-screen’d down below I rambled in the ...”

“... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...”

“... Exter’s interest in vivid colour (the two women met in Paris in 1911), and with her husband, Robert Delaunay, developed a technique they called Simultanism, in which contrasting colours are placed alongside each other, or allowed to overlap, creating an impression of motion and gesture. Exter’s Composition (Genoa) of 1912 is displayed next to ...”

“... which David Thomson’s mother belonged, was very grand and patriarchal. The patriarch, ‘Uncle Robert’, was Viscount Finlay of Nairn who had been a Liberal MP with Gladstone, Lord Chancellor under Lloyd George and, in his eighties, a judge of the International Court at the Hague. Twenty or thirty people, servants or relations, stood in the dining-room ...”

“... Most modern editions of The Winter’s Tale explain – and rightly – that its title is an Elizabethan phrase indicating scepticism, the equivalent to our ‘romantic nonsense’. The work is underwriting its own lightness, its randomness. But not without irony; for the title has a further dimension. It is oddly literal: the play begins in winter ...”

“... could count on him for neat, perplexing fiction. I say until lately because his recent memoirs, Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013), may startle fans of his writing with their formlessness and clutter, ham-handed lyricism and epic egotism. My fear, picking up 4321, was that it had been written by the imprudent, tone-deaf Auster of ...”

“... with whom he is having (after many years of boring marital fidelity) an unsatisfactory affair. The Winter Garden is, primarily, a flowerless London backyard, but the title, like the cunningly-written opening chapter, requires to be taken rather carefully. Ashburner steals clumsily out of his wife’s bedroom at dawn, a hopeless innocent, incapable of decently ...”

“... with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early winter of 1918 I met Willa Anderson … My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life.’Willa’s background was very different. Her parents came from Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, but she was brought up on the mainland, in ...”

“... Jay Winter’s introduction to the work in honour of Henry Pelling points to a shift that has been taking place in the writing of labour history – from concentration on militant strivings towards interest in the ordinary existence of working men and women. The first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars ...”

“... frequent targets for enemy fire. More troublesome was the fierce heat that had succeeded an iron winter: already in March, the month of Fenton’s arrival, William Russell of the Times was cursing the hand-knitted mittens still arriving in their thousands from worried mothers. The rising temperatures interfered disastrously with the chemicals, necessitating ...”

“... tones by ‘the ghost of me mum’ identifying him as ‘the same little boy that I sent out in winter with Cockney inscribed on your satchel!’ After that, the socialite is struck by a vengeful personal vowel-shift (‘ALL ROYT MOY SAHN! HA’S YOR FARVAH?’) and, his cover blown, takes to destroying the party. Other betrayals of home and aborted escapes ...”

“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... My dear Lady Olliffe,’ Robert Browning wrote in March 1877: I have just been reading my old friend Miss Martineau’s protest against the publication – and indeed, retention – of all correspondence. Here, now, is a sample of mine: be assured I shall never demand it again, from any apprehension that hereafter the friendliness in it may be at variance with whatever feeling I please to entertain thirty years hence ...”

“... and rhythms of the printers’ working lives. In the wake of brilliant studies by McKenzie, Robert Darnton and others, McKitterick reconstructs the economics of book production: the costs of type, copper plates and paper, the sizes of editions, the prices per sheet of the resulting books (slightly lower than London ones). Moving from the warehouse to ...”