Search Results

“... had survived the war and its nature underlines the degree to which she identified with the dead young men she wrote about in her autobiography Testament of Youth, which covers the years from her birth in 1893 until her marriage in 1925, but is centrally concerned with her experiences during the Great War, after which she felt herself ‘a haphazard survivor ...”

“... Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in 1925 drank hard liquor out of teapots in speakeasies; or danced – danced, danced, danced! – often in a ...”

“... Origo offers this sage advice to those embarking on a career in the life-writing trade: The young biographer who has upon his desk his first intriguing pile of papers, will do well to arm himself with humility, and let them speak for themselves. Later on the time will come to sift, to compare, and to bring to life again; but first he should listen ...”

“... is one         Free in soul beneath the sun.Mazzini might die ‘chainless’, but the young poet’s sense of honour felt shackled. ‘Too long the world has waited,’ the second stanza begins, ‘Against his chain the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford ...”

“... is concerned’, as he wrote in Reality versus Romance in South Central Africa (1893). Six ‘young Jamaican men’ accompanied him to ‘relieve the white man of manual toil’, although there was ‘their natural lack of “stick-at-it-iveness” and backbone to be overcome’. By 1901, Carby notes, he had become ‘a well-paid creator of tourist ...”

“... Finish Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea, an account of the time he spent at Aldeburgh as a young man. It’s uncritical of the regime, adulatory of Britten and Imogen Holst, though more muted about Pears. The fact is Aldeburgh was a court, and whether the ruler is Henry VIII or Benjamin Britten all courts are the same, with the courtiers anxious to ...”

“... men lounging on street corners, Saturday-night fights, the number of barefoot children, how many young women drank in the local (the women in Southwark, we learn, ‘live on fried fish and four ale’, a mild beer sold at fourpence a quart). They populated their notebooks with vignettes of dock labourers, organ grinders, costers and ...”

“... forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a confirmatory miracle. She is imprisoned by the authorities in a convent. Gabriel becomes a ...”

“... continually remind us that Aids is ‘the gay disease’, no government education programmes for young people have been aimed at the gay audience in either country. It is said that brochures about Aids had to be smuggled into England from America in diplomatic pouches, so that they would not be confiscated as pornography. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ...”

“... grandparenting authority, the weight of ‘Mom-ism’ and ‘bossism’. He contrasts the plea in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman – ‘I just can’t take hold, Mom, I can’t take hold of some kind of a life’ – with rip-roaring frontier folk material: ‘Raised in the backwoods, suckled by a polar bear, nine rows of jaw teeth, a double coat of ...”

“... fully comprehend. In the course of his narrative, Ottey comments on acts of personal kindness by Arthur Scargill; for him, the NUM President represents ‘a strange mixture of ruthlessness and sensitivity’. A similar sense of contradiction informs Crick’s critical yet not hostile study. The second edition has appeared only two months after the first ...”

“... Western Eyes, another novel that proved too much for Garnett. He once remarked admiringly of the young Arnold Bennett that ‘the most interesting thing about him is the strange amalgam he presents of commercial man pure and simple, and author’. But he had to deal with less adaptable authors, and he did so with skill and endless enthusiasm. His review of ...”

“... those who endure? Tomlinson’s ‘Up at La Serra’ dramatises the restricting circumstances of a young Italian poet called Paolo Bertolani,                 who had no more to offer than a sheaf of verse          in the style of Quasimodo. Bertolani has since achieved a style of his own; his most recent volume, Seina, is written in ...”

“... the sense in which that description applies, for instance, to John Stuart Mill (or even perhaps to Arthur Balfour). Brougham’s intellect could serve him superbly in political life, especially perhaps in the mastery of complex subjects displayed in some of his astonishing speeches. Yet the great 1828 speech on law reform, whether or not Brougham was ...”

“... just merits the attention of a critical-biographer – as well write a book on Walter Legge or Arthur Gelb. Since the Lamberts as a dynasty do not have the special cultural force of the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists or even the Auden Group, we are left with the supposition that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and ...”