Search Results

“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... in Manchester in 1857 it was seen by 1.3 million visitors, and two years later the photographer James Robinson had the bad taste to make stereoscopic images of it, so that the viewer could enter the scene of the suicide in 3D. At times the authors’ tone (perhaps inadvertently) succumbs to bombast: ‘a stellar roll call of American poets who took their ...”

“... Gaspar go out first, but instead of heading straight downstairs, the boy took off running down the hall. At first Juan thought he was making for the elevator. But then he realised Gaspar had sensed the same thing he had, though with one big difference: instead of avoiding it – Juan was so used to those presences that he ignored them – he was drawn to it ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning suggest, as a mutation of county philistinism rather than a populist affectation.* His social liberalism, when not merely the product of good manners, seems to be a recent acquisition, while his mind-broadening PR job at Carlton TV was, Elliott and ...”

“... them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags. Going, going. Gone. But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is she? And who was she before all ...”

“... walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do ...”

“... way . . . In fact, the coach in question is quite a good coach and will probably end up in the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He and Henry are almost exactly alike as human beings. It’s not unusual for people to talk this way to Frank. After all, he used to be a writer, and it sometimes seems that almost everyone he meets thinks that that makes it OK for ...”

“... looking for his copy of Nine Stories, on the inside cover of which he had made a list of the James Bond-style gadgets his grandfather had developed before being deployed in Europe. The book is there but the inside cover is blank, the tiny mystery solved when he works out that he and his first wife both had a copy of the book, and had inadvertently ...”

“... which I suppose was handy for the courts, still functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if they were neglected. It’s a High ...”

“... held in celebration of the conquest of Algiers.The Tortuous Streets of Arles: Henry JamesHenry James, visiting in about 1883, in writing about Arles, complains about the streets – he calls them ‘tortuous and featureless’ just as Murray in his Handbook, some thirty years earlier, had described them as forming ‘a labyrinth of dirty narrow ...”

“... Volume III brings us to the Renaissance. We notice immediately the firm direction of the editor, James McConica, who has imposed an order on the writing of the history of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon in productions by diverse hands. His long-standing interest in the social composition of Oxford, and his familiarity with some of the ...”

“... the empire market, Scots proved fast learners. It was two enterprising Scots, William Jardine and James Matheson, who forced opium on China in the 1820s. Their work was continued by Scottish bureaucrats like James Bruce, the 8th earl of Elgin, whose father stole the Parthenon Marbles from Greece. ‘I never felt so ashamed ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”