Search Results

“... or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a ...”

“... Samuel Butler might be seen as one of those liberators who escort readers and admirers into a new airy sort of cell, and turn the key with an air of bestowing on them perfect freedom and emancipation of mind. So effective a freedom fighter was he, at least on one front, that his message and his books may now seem not much more than literary curiosities ...”

“... Perhaps only new countries can have a real past, peopled with genuine ghosts and filled with authentic records. Or it is countries other than one’s own that are so endowed? Any place that peoples the mind and compels the imagination is not likely to be our own: that past and place are founded, for our own self-preservation, on some variety of Larkin’s ‘forgotten boredom ...”

“... Five years ago the formidable chairwoman of the first Russian Booker Prize remarked of one of the entries that she’d never been so disgusted in her life. There was an American judge on the panel, also a woman, who looked surprised. Conditioned as she and I were to the novel in the West, we had scarcely noticed what seemed to us rather quaint attempts by younger Russian novelists – aspirants for the prize – to shock and repel their readers ...”

“... Power stalks the corridors as it has always done, and operates in the same ways, but it increasingly prefers to do so in a mean privacy. Shakespeare today would no longer have the feel of what happens there. The media have taken over the forecourt; and art, in the true sense, no longer has the entrée. Even the Russian novel cannot get in, as it was able to do without effort in the days of War and Peace and Resurrection, following the novels of Balzac and Scott ...”

“... In 1929 Wilson Knight wrote an essay ‘Myth and Miracle’ which deeply impressed T.S. Eliot. So deeply, in fact, that Eliot offered to persuade the Oxford University Press to publish Knight’s essays and to write an introduction for them himself. The result was The Wheel of Fire, one of our century’s seminal books on Shakespeare. At the same time Eliot sent Knight an inscribed copy of his poem ‘Marina’, ‘a perfect poetical commentary’, as Knight observed, ‘on those Shakespearian meanings which I had unveiled ...”

“... The well-known speech in Dryden’s play Aurungzebe beginning, ‘When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat,’ has the emperor gloomily observing that we still expect from the last dregs of life ‘what the first sprightly running could not give’. The empress, however, takes a different line: keeping going is what matters. Each day’s a mistress, unenjoyed before: Like travellers, we’re pleased with seeing more ...”

“... and revered Newman, who had, as Martin reminds us, intenser emotions about other men, Ambrose St John in particular, ‘than are usually considered normal’. Martin also gives an enchanting quote from Newman’s novel Loss and Gain, which somehow encapsulates the whole curious and colourful world of Victorian Oxford’s High Church friendships and ...”

“... the same thing does not happen again. One of Ratushinskaya’s poems describes a dream in which John the Baptist appears in the Gulag, filthy and ragged, and is succoured by one of the female inmates before he gets ready to fly away. She longs for a miracle, to see her daughter, and begs him to perform it. But he is silent, weeping, and she wakes up from a ...”

“... Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall ...”

“... much more than other woman writers, Victorian or contemporary. Writing to Dickens’s biographer, John Forster, about Charlotte Brontë’s forthcoming marriage to her curate Arthur Nicholls, Mrs Gaskell said that Charlotte ‘would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, passionate, law-giving man ... could never have borne not to be well-ruled ...”

“... is anything to go by, but it gave her no confidence. Finally she took up with a young Dutchman, John Lenglet, who came from a background as respectable as her own, though he was already married, to an actress, and was still not divorced when he and Jean celebrated their bigamous wedding in The Hague in 1919. Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight doesn’t like ...”

“... in its wounded and brilliant malignancy, his own young wife and her lover into the Brenda Last and John Beaver of A Handful of Dust. It had been essential for Waugh to transmute what had gone on and what had not gone on during that brief marriage into what John Cowper Powys would call his ‘Life Illusion’: the sense of ...”

“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... last he exclaimed: ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford.’ ‘I am John Henry Newman,’ the lady replied, raising her veil to show the well-known face. The touchingly beautiful and moving end of Newman’s poem, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, is a perfect ...”