Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... of the law of treason by Eyre (which has recently attracted renewed ironical attention from John Barrell) which was hurled into print on the very eve of the notorious Treason Trials of 1794. The second piece is the ‘Considerations’ on the Two Acts (1795), in which Godwin seemed to come forward (anonymously) to condone legislation against popular ...”

“... all, and she escapes as the tyrant is overwhelmed by his own mutinous verbiage. Earlier this year John Mullan wrote an article proposing that the essential difference between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ is that only ‘literary’ novels ‘ask us to attend to the manner of their telling’. The implication is that genre fiction with ...”

“... which appeared in early 1959 only two months after the Hanover show, the artist and critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites Paul Schilder on the ‘fragmentary associations’ that we fold into our body images. Similar reflections on the infantile development of the corporeal imago had been made ...”

“... Light Infantry.* Now we have the high-minded and contentious letters of an ensign in the Guards, John Aitchison, who soldiered on after the war to become General Sir John Aitchison GCB, with a baton in his reach when he died at 87. Ensign Aitchison, while as eager as the next man for honour and renown, was one of those ...”

“... aesthetic is not, as many have thought and as Davie had feared, an oxymoron. It was after all John Calvin who clothed Protestant worship with the sensuous grace, and necessarily the aesthetic ambiguity, of song; and who that has attended worship in a French Calvinist church can deny that – over and above whatever religious experience he may or may not ...”

“... is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters. Apart ...”

“... and went early to university, where he quickly established himself as a comic genius. Harry Thompson has written a serious and carefully researched biography, and his early pages can be read in perfect silence. Suddenly, however, as it reaches the early Sixties, the narrative is interspersed with indented passages of Peter Cook’s jokes. They creep up ...”

“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”

“... they have picked them up from the newspapers, or from each other. And the small defendants, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, seem to belong in some other reality. Again, the book’s cadences and concerns go to work, drawing out a reinforcing memory. Our legal system can seem divorced from reality, estranging; the people in a courtroom can seem to live in ...”

“... with each other, Cunard – photographed by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Curtis Moffat, Cartier-Bresson, John Banting and others – was one of the figures in whom they converged. Gucci’s ‘Hard Deco’ line for Spring 2012 was launched in homage to ‘Louise Brooks and Nancy Cunard’. This edition of her poems chooses one of Moffat’s photographs for its ...”

“... back in a tradition descending from 17th-century Anabaptists and Ranters, of Ezra and Isaiah, of John Bunyan, of the New Jerusalem, of watchwords from the walls of Zion, of ancient prophecies, of the Whore of Babylon and the Beast, of the Land of Beulah, of blood on the walls of palaces, lambs entangled in thorns, and of ‘the old vail of the law, under ...”

“... In his brilliant account of collapsing Yugoslavia, A Paper House, Mark Thompson meets a leader of the Vojvodina Ruthenes called Professor Julijan Tamas. Since 1989 this tiny people has been struggling back into political existence. In 1991 they managed to stage the first World Congress of Ruthenes and just before that the first Bible in Ruthenian had finally appeared ...”

“... Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have ...”

“... 1946, only to be expelled by a reactionary faculty – he had dared to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the ...”