Search Results

“... of wheels to two, but tricycles and quadricycles were heavy going. A fetching illustration by George Cruikshank, dated 1819, shows two young women, each mounted on a Draisine-type Female Accelerator, taking grateful advantage of the breast-rests fitted above the handlebars to ease the strain of leaning forward while on the march. Such supports (if they ...”

“... eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the battle cruiser Renown, which used 35,798 ...”

“... as a male concubine to this Eastern Circe.’ That is the sort of career break the Flashman of George MacDonald Fraser could have taken in his stride, but Rohmer’s males have ‘a marked streak of puritanism’ in them, saying things like ‘I had never been a woman’s man’ or ‘I was never a squire of dames.’ Their ability to keep their minds on ...”

“... obscure and improbable Helicons. This addiction would have astounded the good Dr Struve who, in George IV’s Brighton, operated his German Spa with a row of taps offering the ‘factitious’, or homemade, waters of Ems, Baden Baden, Pyrmont and the best Bohemian springs; an enterprise which saw him widely patronised and widely reviled. At least it was ...”

“... Wiener … Fish Sticks … T Paper’. ‘The archive is vast and frankly, imposing,’ Lynell George reports in the book she made from her exploration of it, a sensitive combination of facsimile scraps, biographical fragments and indirect-discourse speculation. George herself is Black and Los Angelena, and first came to ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... unfavourably to the Mississippi Valley, which had allowed a harmonious civil society to take root. George Kennan, who did visit South America, used what he imagined to be the natural violence of the Amazon basin as a metaphor for the dismal history of Spanish and Portuguese America, especially its disastrous racial intermixing: ‘The handicaps to ...”

“... A visit to the exhibits at the Tate Gallery short-listed for this year’s Turner Prize shows how professionalism today runs not only artistic theory but art itself. There was nothing to take in except the theory of it. Animated discussion, even cries of pleasure and pain, were to be heard from the neighbouring exhibition of the strange and superb work of Gerhard Richter ...”

“... the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who – he suggests – probably heard it from Reggie Turner. In her version, ‘a curious, very young, but hard-eyed creature appeared, looked at him, gave a sort of laugh, and passed on. He felt, he said, “as if an icy hand had clutched at his heart”. He had a sudden presentiment. He saw a vision of ...”

“... and clergyman, who was summoned to the capital with a straitjacket and a trio of keepers to attend George III during his first mental collapse – a disorder which the waters of Cheltenham and Weymouth were powerless to alleviate. For many, if not most, the spa peregrination was never a serious quest for health, or relief of gout or barrenness: it was, as Dr ...”

“... town of ineffable horror’. All that he has foreseen is now happening in Britain. The reign of George VI ‘will go into history as the most disastrous my unhappy country has known since Matilda and Stephen’. The new Queen has already been seen in slacks. And the French revenge themselves on their liberators by sending camembert made from United Nations ...”

“... bedbugs (an estimate, surely). Bedbugs were a major hazard. Not everyone could afford, like George III, to hire a man of the calibre of Andrew Cooke, of Holborn, ‘Bug Destroyer to His Majesty’, who had ‘cured 16,000 beds with great applause’. The author does not dwell too long on those Victorian horrors which, for many, made good housekeeping ...”

“... double-heighted central living area ‘the piazza’ because it is so big). He also features in George Monbiot’s ‘Fat Cats Directory’ of the 45 most influential hypocrites in Britain (see Monbiot’s Captive State). Rogers accepted the chairmanship of the Urban Task Force, which sought to reduce pressure on greenfield sites and to encourage social ...”

“... Jack’, hanged at Tyburn, was a popular figure in the train of the young Prince of Wales (George IV) at Brighton. It was left to an eminent man of letters to acclaim the cult of the high tobyman in the loftiest of terms, with scarcely a glimmer of reservation. In a passage which Gillian Spraggs has done well to disinter, Thomas de Quincey, in the grip ...”

“... One, a novel, may be called ‘Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton’ (Home is not a fan of George Orwell), and samples passages from classic London literature, reworked to make each paragraph exactly 100 words long. Another is called ‘Memphis Underground’, and is set in London, Orkney and North Africa. And the third is a short volume called ...”