Search Results

“... retreated, nor did he advance beyond it. Everything that was essential to his thinking, as Margaret Belcher rightly insists in her essay on Pugin’s writing, was contained in his first important book, Contrasts. With its publication in 1836 his transformation was complete. That of the Gothic Revival now followed. It had passed through its histrionic ...”

“... to fall. Lots of other people had seen Hanratty in Rhyl, in much more convincing circumstances. Margaret Walker, who lived in the street behind the guest-house, had made a statement to the police during the trial but had not been called to give evidence. She was absolutely certain that on the evening of 22 August a young man looking like Hanratty had come ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates ...”

“... line supposed to demonstrate two of the received national characteristics, class and modesty. Then Margaret Thatcher died (her funeral was another good show) and there was a lot of talk about the way the country had changed since she became prime minister, a year before I joined Mrs Hazel’s class. Arguments ran along predictable lines: the privatisation of ...”

“... moral economy was tested, and cracked.’ Here, Lloyd usefully chips away at the notion of Margaret Thatcher as a supervillain of Scottish history. As he writes, the rot started before she took office, but where Wilson, Callaghan and even Heath sought to manage the decline of Britain’s traditional industries, Thatcher removed the state from the ...”

“... was forced out of the ministry for trading and promptly went bankrupt. As Ruth First and Ann Scott tell us in their 1980 biography of Schreiner, this catastrophe ‘scattered the children and marked the end of the family home’. It seems, on the face of it, as noteworthy as the maternal spanking. The Companion is similarly silent about Olive’s ...”

“... in Taylor’s more orthodox poems, which he valued, as would any good friend of Sir Walter Scott, as a source of quaint details about everyday life in Jacobean London. Malcolm’s proposal of an unbroken, overarching historical trajectory of nonsense stretching from the Renaissance to the Victorians looks equally shaky in the other direction, when he ...”

“... the idea of the enemy within: not in the sense of a mole working for a foreign power, or the way Margaret Thatcher thought of the miners, but of conflicts between ambitious actors struggling for supremacy at one government agency or another. In Dead Lions, Diana Taverner, head of operations at the Park (Kristin ...”

“... insult: that John Buchan belonged not, as the family piously hoped, in a Scots Valhalla with Scott and Stevenson (even if a long way downtable), but with two English writers of almost unbelievable crudity, ‘Sapper’ and Dornford Yates. Despite defences of John Buchan by Gertrude Himmelfarb in an essay in Encounter in 1960, and Janet Adam Smith in her ...”

“... in a gathering political night. The politics indeed are unpredictable, as politics always are. Margaret Thatcher may, despite herself, fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British ...”

“... and alliances. James’s decision in 1502 to seek peace with England, sealed by his marriage to Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s daughter, the next year, was a pragmatic one. The match, lauded by Dunbar as the marriage of ‘the Thistle and the Rose’, didn’t mean stable peace let alone a friendship between Tudors and Stewarts that might point to future ...”

“... of Whig romantics in Edinburgh around 1807. A version of the poem appears there, with the name Margaret Caroline replaced by that of Fannila. In this version the last verses are given as But too late I found that even she could deceive And nothing was left but to sigh, weep and rave. Distracted I flew from my dear native shore, Resolv’d to see ...”

“... son, was settled in Oxfordshire at Stratton Audley. He lived until 1326 and married a sister of Margaret, sister and co-heiress of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and granddaughter of Edward I. He was a rival therefore of Despenser for the Clare inheritance in Glamorgan and was very active against Despenser in 1322-6. His father indeed was attainted in ...”

“... Samuel Smiles conned men when in Self-Help he persuaded them that any man could, say, build the Scott Monument or discover vaccination. In blustering across ravines, neither Grand nor Smiles seemed to see that as long as ravines were there many people would fall into them. Grand would certainly not have appreciated the content of a poem I came across ...”