Search Results

“... it for him. Until as late as 1815, his play used to be staged annually on 5 November, the date of William III’s landing in England and the beginning of the end for James II. Tamerlane was a cult play among Protestants, as Tamerlane stood in for William III, while the Ottoman Sultan ...”

“... and was angered by the plan to marry him to the daughter of the hero of the Dutch resistance, William of Orange. Blair Worden puts it neatly: ‘Where Sidney’s plan to marry Orange’s daughter was a pledge of commitment to international Protestantism, Elizabeth’s negotiations with Anjou signalled her repudiation of it’. In the late summer of ...”

“... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...”

“... Kettering’s simple Baptist church contains a dedication to the missionary and emancipator William Knibb, who growing up in England had worshipped at Fuller, the chapel where my father was a minister. The money needed to buy the land for the ‘free village’ of Kettering in the immediate aftermath of the end of slavery in 1833 had come from ...”

“... of his closest friendships remained formal, mediated through books; his longstanding translator, William Weaver, recalled Calvino flinching every time he was obliged to call him ‘Bill’. In a preface to Numbers in the Dark, a collection of short and very short stories, Calvino’s widow, Esther, quotes a note from 1943 that she discovered among his ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight ...”

“... estate, and her final defiant infatuation at the age of 80 with the strapping second-rate actor William Augustus Conway. Hester’s mother had taught her only child ‘to play a thousand pretty Tricks, & tell a Thousand Pretty Stories and repeat a Thousand pretty verses to divert’ her violent, irascible and elegant father. ‘Rakish men seldom make tender ...”

“... Christian apologist, and I was, I confess, the man who had not read The Man Who Was Thursday. P.D. James, in her introduction to a selection of Father Brown stories, says: ‘Chesterton never wrote an inelegant or clumsy sentence.’ Almost everyone reaches for the word ‘genial’ when they talk about him, and we are told that he loved to argue. All of these ...”

“... and Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and metalwork. It was a reinvention of the country house as social force, ‘a quiet attempt to change the ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... in turn, are helped by Ella Grogan, the daughter of a local midwife and a gardener’s boy, William. All the characters in this hierarchy gain some narrative attention, but mainly it plays over the old man and the Paxtons’ daughter Alice. Between them, these two mark off a momentous span of English historical time. Alice is born on the eve of Eden’s ...”

“... William Blake is surely the locus classicus for human sympathy with other-than-human animals. Anyone who is, as I am, seared by the cruelty and injustice humans inflict on their fellow animals will recognise in Blake his own perceptions expressed with unsurpassed accuracy and poignancy. Blake died a decade before Victoria came to the throne ...”

“... William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England ...”

“... outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of the landmark Education Act. Forster’s personal style was flat, but Matthew was also jealous of his political success. Still, he did not give his sister away – in the Lake Country ‘with the great fells standing sentinel’, as family ...”