Search Results

“... characterise nobody but Clive James. It would matter less if he were less ignorant. He describes Alan Wearne’s verse novel The Nightmarkets as ‘so solidly or anyway heavily involved in the tradition of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky and the yellow pages of the telephone directory’. Here, in neat reversal, only the joke is ...”

“... eminence of the Times. The first woman doctor is kept company by the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or ...”

“... and mysteriously resigned as Premier. The list, written down by Wilson’s éminence grise, Marcia Williams, on her lavender-coloured writing paper, consisted almost entirely of rich right-wing businessmen who supported the Tory Party. It included the Lord High Buccaneer from Milnsbridge, James Hanson. When Thatcher was returned as Prime Minister in ...”

“... the title page with authorship of the novelisation (subsequent adventures of Luke Skywalker are by Alan Dean Foster, with Seltzer the leading noveliser of our times). But the copyright of the book is Star Wars Corporation. The title, and all the dramatis personae, are covered by r or TM registrations. (They are enforced, too: the Star Wars people are ...”

“... Eating Primer’. Perhaps it is the same boy who has inscribed across one of the pages: ‘G.H. Williams, Lancs and England’.22 January. Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock ...”

“... is surely a very hazardous assumption. Lucas, we may suppose, is too sophisticated to think, with Alan Massey writing in PN Review, that words like ‘porte-cochère’ comfortably remove Hill’s poem from any applicability to the England where it was written and published: ‘The scene is France: the time is Péguy’s time, 1873-1914 ...’ But if that is ...”

“... audiences howling into their tumblers for years. To someone like me who grew up thinking Kenneth Williams was the perfect English gentleman (and imagining Russell Harty and Lily Savage to be the perfect Northern blokes), the words of Norman Tebbit are not just mad in the way you’d expect from him, but also profoundly at odds with something outrageously ...”

“... Linda died of emphysema in 1954. Porter, ‘a homosexual who had never seen the closet’, as Alan Jay Lerner put it, was always true to Linda in his fashion. After she had parted ways with her philandering first husband, who was reported to have had sadistic conjugal tastes, Linda ‘had had enough of the sexual side of marriage’, according to Brendan ...”

“... those as well. ‘I’ve been to Australia. It was all I could do to be civil.’ Ursula Vaughan Williams. ‘Shall we remind ourselves of the earlier history of this picture?’ Anthony Blunt with a group of 11-year-olds in the National Gallery. Madman: If you ever want some good petrol, this is the place. I’ve had some really good petrol from here in ...”

“... There’s​ a very short story by Diane Williams which came into my mind while I was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and it’s 104 words long. It ends: ‘For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly ...”

“... of her book and who played so prominent a role in Nazi Germany was English: Winifred Marjorie Williams, born in Hastings in 1897. Orphaned at an early age, she came to stay in Oranienburg, near Berlin, with distant relatives, the aged Wagnerians Henriette and Karl Klindworth, in 1907. Karl had studied with Liszt, founded a conservatoire and written piano ...”

“... much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgment, it’s not one Leader dissents from – or dissents from sufficiently, drink and good fellowship equated throughout. Never having been able to drink much, partly through not having been ...”

“... The new generation of ‘cultural materialists’, however (the term is borrowed from Raymond Williams, who contributes an afterword), are much more suspicious of ‘high culture’. In his introduction to Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore analyses a tripartite pattern in ideological conflicts of consolidation, subversion and containment. In ...”

“... thought, she is too eclectic and inconsistent in her methodology (as suggested by the savaging Alan Ryan gave her book on Mill); while to hard-nosed historians of political action, she seems altogether too preoccupied with ideology (as shown by the severe criticisms of her attempt to analyse the passing of the Second Reform Bill in these terms). For the ...”

“... than the Book of Revelation. Orwell had Eton and the military police to draw on for 1984, and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) had Orwell. What’s interesting is that for this ‘entirely new departure’ James stayed so close to the sense that runs through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together ...”