Search Results

“... instead to provide scraps of gossip that might give insights into his character and conversation. John Aubrey related that Shakespeare was the son of a butcher who ‘when he killed a calf would do it in high style, and make a speech’. By the early 18th century, Shakespearean biography was turning into something of an industry, with an indiscriminate ...”

“... should be finally discredited. Writing about the centenary of the Fabian Society, Gareth Stedman Jones recently made the simple yet profound observation that ‘in no other country is it easy to imagine a socialist association able to celebrate a hundred years of continuous existence’ and suggested that this achievement ‘owes as much to the stability and ...”

“... Kipling is believed to have destroyed his correspondence with his parents and with Burne-Jones, and most of his inward mail. His letters to his wife and to her mother have disappeared, almost certainly by his wife’s hand; and his daughter, Mrs Bambridge, ordered the destruction of her mother’s diaries. His wife and daughter ...”

“... to Sir Walter Raleigh, or to find in Doctor Faustus an occasional glimpse of Simon Forman or John Dee or Henry Percy (the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland). Given the ‘desire to speak with the dead’ to which Greenblatt hubristically admitted at the start of his follow-up to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), it’s a ...”

“... Morgan puts it, Foot was not just Bevan’s comrade but (modestly) ‘his Boswell, his Engels, his John the Baptist, and of course his parliamentary heir’. At this distance it is difficult to understand the passions of the decade-long civil war between Bevanites and Gaitskellites which originated with the split of 1951, when Gaitskell imposed prescription ...”

“... In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he interrogated an old man whose long life in the wake of the Reformation seemed to have left him entirely ignorant of all matters theological and ecclesiastical ...”

“... supposedly of the couple’s pots and pans, a bust of Cahun by Chana Orloff. The underbidder was John Berger, which suggests that there was some art-world knowledge of Cahun and Moore even then. Perhaps rebelling against a subtitle giving Moore equal creative status, Stevenson disposes of the idea that she made a contribution to the photographs, basing his ...”

“... and West Point are not useful frames of reference. Reviewing Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, John Updike singled out a particular detail as seeming to be ‘miraculously recovered’ from the past – the pink dimple left in the flesh of a man’s neck by the collar stud he has been wearing. Chatwin was reaching back a couple of generations. Enrigue ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... Frances Yates, Rykwert discusses the interest in architecture shown by the Elizabethan magus John Dec and the possible connection between Dee and Inigo Jones. So far, so good: Perrault had not written yet. But it turns out – another exciting discovery – that Sir Christopher Wren, despite his admiration for ...”

“... itself as one of the pieties of Crusading historiography long before the veteran Python, Terry Jones, delivered his adverse verdict on television. Even novelists like Scott, Henty and Rider Haggard have been inclined to take a remarkably severe view of the Crusading enterprise. It is hardly surprising that modern Arab historians, besides condemning the ...”

“... most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his readership. Prynne has been compared with John Ashbery, but there is little of Ashbery’s canny slackness of tone or perspective. The poems, by contrast, are dense and alarming; where Olson conceived of the poem as an ‘open field’, Prynne is inclined to think of it as a battlefield, as in ‘Die a ...”

“... from the 1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the 1880s ascendancy of Leighton, Watts and Burne-Jones – a massive insular detour? Wasn’t Millais, as the Royal Academy’s most popular hit producer, the epitome of an age of evasive imperial complacency? Mainstream art history places him as a stumbling-block on the path to a British Modernism, berating ...”

“... meant that others remained with the side long after they became the focus of attention. One was John Fashanu, an astonishingly crude player and an extremely articulate man, who went on to achieve further fame as a TV presenter and further notoriety when he was implicated in a match-fixing scandal from which he was eventually acquitted (he currently presents ...”

“... seeing it as a great opportunity, and so the production went ahead, with Mona Washbourne, Gemma Jones and Brian Cox in the other parts. I didn’t attend many of the rehearsals. I still wasn’t certain that one should. The question had not arisen in Forty Years On since I was there anyway as a member of the cast. Practices differ. Some playwrights attend ...”