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“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... Throughout his fiction there’s a puritan unease about the emasculating effect of sex. Sybille Bedford, Huxley’s first biographer, notes his distaste for promiscuity, ‘which spends itself purposely, without producing love or even, in the long run, amusement’. After Many a Summer, Time Must Have a Stop and The Genius and the Goddess all centre on a ...”

“... 3; and the evening ended (again rousingly but not nationalistically) with Rossini’s Overture to William Tell. The result was an eclectic mixture, but it was much more European than British, and the programmes were conspicuously devoid of those military, nautical, jingoistic or imperial overtones so much in evidence in Britain during those years. But while ...”

“... Russells. His uncle Rollo began to lose his sight and had to leave the Foreign Office, his uncle William went mad and was consigned to an asylum where he spent the rest of his long life, and his father had an epileptic seizure. In the winter of 1873-4, his parents and his older brother Frank went to Italy. When they came back, Frank had diphtheria; though he ...”

“... through Ottoman Syria to Anatolia and Mesopotamia, had worked on Byzantine churches with Sir William Ramsay, the epigraphist, and had charted and mapped the ancient mosque and palace of Ukhaidir. In addition to her scientific writings she had published two books about her journeys: Syria: the Desert and the Sown and Amurath to Amurath.In 1914 Gertrude ...”

“... rule them despotically. It is acknowledged, however, that he had sponsored the researches of Sir William Jones,4 which had laid scientific foundations for the truth that Hindus and Muslims had laws and knew what property was. Hastings, of whose guilt Dr O’Brien is in no doubt, is a complex figure, though less so than that strange mixture of villainy and ...”

“... student to find out what her invitation referred to, and accepted it only when she learned that William James had been there before her, with his Varieties of Religious Experience). The lectures were subsequently put together, after her death in 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young ...”

“... that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after ...”

“... After graduation she worked as a teaching assistant in Latin at the university, before going to Bedford College in London to write a thesis on child psychology. By the time she met Edwin at a mutual friend’s house in Glasgow, she was a lecturer in English, psychology and education and vice-principal of Gipsy Hill Teacher Training College in ...”

“... Shepherd was her driving technique. Scarcely had I put my shoulder to the back of the van, an old Bedford, than a long arm was stretched elegantly out of the driver’s window to indicate in textbook fashion that she (or rather I) was moving off. A few yards further on, as we were about to turn into Albany Street, the arm emerged again, twirling elaborately ...”

“... a well-earned shift of emphasis. Hazlitt would have learned this way of thinking from his father, William Hazlitt Sr, a notable sermon-writer whose work was published by Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Wordsworth and Blake. Yet the morality of Dissent always seemed to press up against a crisis of belief. The Antinomians in New England made the challenge most ...”

“... Sylvia Plath, Daphne Du Maurier, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jolley, Sybille Bedford and many others. Female autobiographers have been similarly forthright about such hatreds – if less so about the pleasures of posthumous retribution. When a famous and idealised older woman fails to live up to the needs of a younger protégée it is de ...”

“... part of a staircase. This infatuation with line is obvious, too, in Gallery of the Old Bedford, composed of two not quite connecting curves, one probably an ornamental lintel for a doorway, the other the gallery projecting beyond it, with a pile-up of men who seem to lean against a central column distinguished by two red vertical lines (repeated ...”

“... down. Nor does he seem fully alert to his own memorable moments. All he says of his speech at Bedford in July 1957 is that it ‘was well reported in the Sunday press, and I think helped to steady things,’ omitting to record that it was in this speech that he uttered the immortal phrase about most of us never having had it so good. His Wind of Change ...”

“... less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other ...”