Search Results

“... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...”

“... saint, the greatest Pope of all. They were clearly in love with him. The Christian Brothers who took me in hand from the age of nine felt the same way but, being great whippers and floggers, they empathised more with his stern authority, those hard unsmiling eyes behind the glasses; in all the thousands of pictures of Pius thrust before us I don’t ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... liberalising force of the Gorbachev years, thanks to his brief in the Politburo – Ideology – took the podium first. His limp is one of the rare memories nowadays of the Great Patriotic War. The Communists and nationalists who grew to hate him in the late Eighties were always slightly inhibited by it. I did a long interview with him in 1995, when he was ...”

“... over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and the singers ‘easy listening’. ‘Easy’ wasn’t a word that was ever associated with Simone. In her life and in her lyrics, she always found drama. The feelings she called ...”

“... in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If ...”

“... the servant girl whose most vivid memory of the encounter which left her with child was that it took place ‘in a ground where pulse growed’. In most of these stories, however, this kind of directness is absent. Instead, and as Stone points out, his characters seem frequently to have employed the mannered and sentimental language of contemporary ...”

“... ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or months of courtship, gift-giving and negotiation. John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk ...”

“... left hand. Parkland stretches behind him. He has written on the picture: ‘the one and only ... I took this fifteen years ago.’ In the winter of 1938-39 Alfred visited the South of France with his sister Amelia and her husband Albert Emery, my maternal grandparents. Amelia wrote in her diary in January 1939 that they were ‘nicely settled in a charming ...”

“... an elaborate theatrical spectacle, appealing to the emotions instead of reason. At the centre of John Barrell’s exhaustive study of treason in the mid-1790s is a brilliantly sustained argument about the struggle to fix the character of the word ‘imagination’. Unlike the battle then being fought over such important political terms as ...”

“... aspired to the throne and, ‘stimulated by ambition and revenge’, plotted to murder her brother John in order to seize it. When her plans were foiled, the guilty princess tried to console herself with writing, but her history ‘betrays in every page the vanity of a female author’ (male authors apparently being exempt from that vice). Subsequent ...”

“... and Portugal, and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of ...”

“... after the Whitemoor escape, the Home Secretary asked a former Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir John Woodcock, ‘to enquire into the circumstances of the escape and to recommend any action that should be taken to avoid any recurrence’. Within a month of the Report’s publication, matters in the Prison Service were very much worse. Frederick West, the ...”

“... from a script. Perhaps it was wise to eliminate me. No doubt I should not have been able to resist John Bright’s definition of British foreign policy as ‘a gigantic system of out-relief for the British aristocracy’. 1882 is even less fertile. All I can discover is that in 1882 Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, administered the oath to himself in the House ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet ...”