Search Results

“... novelist worth catching up on and following, in the wake of and on a level with the likes of James Buchan, Tessa Hadley and Edward St Aubyn. The four books are distinct – there’s no real overlap to speak of – but possess the sort of shared traits that a reader likes to find in an author, and an author in ...”

“... the same subject. As well as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick ...”

“... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...”

“... not alone. Eleanor Marx joined the Ibsen campaign and translated Enemy of the People into English. James Joyce adored Ibsen’s irreverence and laboriously studied Norwegian in order to read his work in the original. The Norwegian bourgeois families populating Ibsen’s plays talk of adultery and suffer from an assortment of diseases, including syphilis. There ...”

“... is still somehow Anglican, but an ecumenical Anglican. A representative Catholic equivalent is James McConica, with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general ...”

“... literary types to muscle in on rather more weighty matters than insect imagery in the later James. Spivak, by contrast, has a proper scorn for such ‘culturalism’, even if she shares a good many of its assumptions. She does not make the mistake of imagining that an essay on the figure of the woman in A Passage to India is inherently more threatening ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... The editor very occasionally supplies material from published biography, but his usual source is James Clifford, and one can tire of Clifford’s editorialising – for instance, on Hester Thrale’s behaviour after the death of her husband: ‘Mrs Thrale’s usual reaction to death was to run away.’ If we’re going to have occasional opinions from ...”

“... a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed ...”

“... In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it killed off a host of accompanying devotional practices ...”

“... likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the literary marketplace. Edward St Aubyn, whose new novel, Lost for Words, is a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 with Mother’s Milk, but lost out to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. ‘Ego’ can ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any contemporary profile-writer. This is not the privilege of hindsight. Newspaper editors simply do not have high enough standards. They should commission profiles from our best ...”

“... of this literature. A sort of boisterous good cheer returns in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide ...”

“... even went down without a degree. However, he had another side and is remembered in the fifth of Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.) Arnold exhausted the patience of tutors, lounging back and refusing to take notes. Naturally he did not take a First in Schools. How could he, cramming three years of reading into a like number of weeks? The family was ...”