Search Results

“... Mary Braddon, for example, best-selling author of Lady Audley’s Secret and a bohemian variant on Jane Eyre, went to live with the publisher John Maxwell, who had ‘five children, and a wife in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that she was interested in bigamy. There is a good deal ...”

“... and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography have been ...”

“... High Heaven for $100,000 (this in 1947) and spent six years trying to develop it. Ring Lardner Jr, Howard Koch and Elmer Rice between them wrote eight drafts. He wouldn’t have Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas: she was too young and had no sex appeal. King Vidor’s wish to have Stanwyck prevailed and the picture grossed $2m in 1937; it is still thought of ...”

“... has inspired such an outpouring of accomplished writing, from Wrong to Gérard Prunier, from Howard French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck ...”

“... coup of marrying his teenage son, Gregory, to Elizabeth Seymour, sister of the current queen, Jane. In an informal sense, the brewer’s son from Putney became the king’s uncle by marriage. This new situation outraged a previous royal uncle by marriage, Anne Boleyn’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk needed pacifying, not least because he was the ...”

“... leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in Corbyn, and only forty against. (He ...”

“... Hence, on the one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of California (a Hungarian by ...”

“... Pie’), my first phone booth, my first cocktail in the bar of a three-dimensional Howard Johnson’s, my first freeway exit, my first white-shingled house with picket fence. Living the movie, I was in that peculiar no man’s land, half-fact, half-fiction, where I remained for weeks, and where I can occasionally still find myself after 18 ...”