Search Results

“... Caroline, who in the 1730s had begun the fashion for giving patronage to ‘unlettered poets’. Stephen Duck, Queen Caroline’s thresher poet, eventually threw himself into the river; Ann Yearsley was made of tougher stuff. More, of course, considered her a savage when the affair turned nasty, though Yearsley got there first: ‘For mine’s a stubborn and ...”

“... didn’t slip at this point: he ripped it off and tossed it to the tabloid press like a knight presenting a favour to his lady. Even in the sordid history of crimes against children the murders committed by Hindley . . . were uniquely evil . . . They abducted, terrified, tortured and killed their victims before burying their bodies on ...”

“... Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential Englishness ...”

“... left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir Peter were not married; the knight had an obdurate wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered ...”

“... Skinner, Audrey Wise, Ken Coates, most of the activists in his Bristol constituency, even his son Stephen – advised him to do so. Benn’s own belief, often expressed here, that the power and influence that mattered came from below, from the shop stewards and socialist trade-unionists, led logically to a resignation and a return to the rank and file. But he ...”

“... he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One claimed he ‘could not find whereof he [Tanner] could levye ...”

“... word ‘correct’ infecting the harder-line analyses. Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1937, Stephen Spender gave his unvarnished view of the Brigade: ‘The qualities required, apart from courage, are terrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism ... or else toughness, cynicism and insensibility ... the truthful live in Hell there.’ Everything people ...”

“... Even Wolfram (c.1170-c.1220) himself, who seems to have enjoyed secure employment as a knight in the service of a lord, wasn’t protected from hunger. With characteristic wryness, he notes that the conditions during the siege of Belrepeire are not unusual: in his own house he, like the mice, sometimes searches in vain for the tiniest scrap of ...”

“... In July 1519 the rackety Franconian knight, poet laureate and satirist Ulrich von Hutten received a long letter from Erasmus of Rotterdam, still at that time his friend. What sort of man, he had asked Erasmus, was this kindred poetic spirit Thomas More, fellow-condemner of court life and author of the diverting Utopia, as well as admirably an admirer of Hutten’s own satire on monkish blankness and obscurantism, Letters from Nonentities (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum)? Erasmus’s reply did for More what he had already done for some and was still to do for others of his English friends: it presented him to the learned Europe of his day ...”

“... in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn of the century, divided the ‘schizosaur’ into type A, the bipedal carnivore or saurischian (‘lizard ...”

“... 20-year-old maid inaugurated a similar union, the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers. Jessie Stephen told the assembled crowd of mistresses and maids that she was ‘out to preach the divine doctrine of discontent’. Soon blacklisted by employers – one of the dangers of unionisation – she made her way to London and joined forces with Oliver. The ...”

“... or private reflections. Tinniswood’s Wren is a thoroughly public figure: Tory MP, wealthy knight and brilliant don, agile at winning backing from hostile regimes, lauded for his managerial abilities and his network of intellectual and political contacts, excused his administrative or aesthetic peccadillos. He is traced mainly through his lengthy ...”

“... phrase of one journalist, ‘like a man on the crapper trying to get to the telephone’. Ray Knight scored from third for the Mets, and downstairs in the Red Sox changing area Costas watched the staff unpeeling clingfilm from the lockers before the distraught players could see it. It goes without saying that the Red Sox lost game seven as well. Bill ...”

“... a sordid contrabandist – neglected, loveless and desperate for the affection and protection of a knight errant like himself. She, too, knew how to act. Kemble was devastated when he discovered that she was a notorious prostitute who was also servicing Boyd and most of the garrison. More shattered illusions, more humiliation, more self-recrimination – but a ...”

“... split himself into two suitors who each represented a side of the author’s bifurcated existence: Stephen Smith, a well-educated but relatively unsophisticated architect’s assistant, a new arrival in London from the country; and Henry Knight, an established, opinionated lawyer deeply at home in literary London (he also ...”