Search Results

“... those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away. The loss of 880,000 men meant that many women would never marry, but they would have the vote and they would have unprecedented ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to ...”

“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... Of the short novel he published in 1932 she gets the very title wrong. And poor Henry Arthur Jones must have suffered enough from his name without being transposed into Arthur Henry. Shaw’s near-compulsion was not a fetish. He was capable of loving women who were neither singers nor actresses. Indeed, he married one of them – who, if Ms Peters has ...”

“... more annoying than adultery). His patient Loë Kann was mistress of his second-in-command Ernest Jones, and letters flew between the three of them about her treatment. Freud spoke warmly of her as he always did – ‘I have become extraordinarily fond of this Loë ... she is a treasure.’ In contrast with his venomous attitude towards some of his male ...”

“... Useful Knowledge – which, stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a book ...”

“... Killing Time is that it is not simply a review of 1999 in verse. In the section about Piccard and Jones, the round-the-world balloonists, Armitage cleverly employs negatives as escape clauses when he wants to tick off some recent horrors without pretending that he is capable of generating poetry from them. In the process, he makes some strange ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... of clientage networks. From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... of scholars are courteously acknowledged for a piece of information or a useful edition; Emrys Jones is praised for a model political reading of Cymbeline, as is D.J. Enright for a poem that is also an act of criticism. But the level of citation of others’ work is low, especially by American standards, and with the single exception of Hugh Kenner no ...”

“... each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek Roper (1968) used 1805, while Brett and Jones (1963) combined 1798 with Vol. II of 1800. Now Mason appears, to reissue the text still available in Roper’s version – and what else? He might have gone in for a critical edition, condensing the interpretative debates, or for supplementing the notes of ...”

“... as, if not equal to their own, certainly worthy of respect. Take the great Orientalist Sir William Jones (of whom Jasanoff might have made more), who declared Sanskrit – one of many languages in which he was proficient – to be ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. The Persians were, he insisted, a ...”