Search Results

“... Here, at last, is a book of which we can sincerely say in the old phrase that it meets a long-felt want. It offers, in the modest words of the Preface, ‘a series of illustrations (which are now often impossible to find except in specialised libraries) of the principal sculptures which were at one time accepted as masterpieces’ – that is, of antique statues with which, until a hundred years ago, the educated public were expected to be familiar ...”

“... The last word of the reissue of Mr Nicholas, Thomas Hinde’s exquisitely glum and fearingly funny novel of 1952, is probably a misprint. At least, it is minutely different from the last word in the Penguin book in 1962, the issue which brought Hinde’s consummate first novel to an even more widely appreciative public ...”

“... of a ‘material’ Renaissance, in which the cost of every object is measured to the last penny. Material in this book refers only to the expenditure of the wealthy, not to the wretchedness of the poor. There is nothing even vaguely Marxist or culturally materialist in Hollingsworth: hers is a material history written from above. The choice is ...”

“... of the young wife whose husband is thinking of the price of the cloth a pedlar is showing her. Nicholas Tromans, in his catalogue essay, writes: ‘Wilkie’s contemporaries valued his early work as dearly as any British art has ever been cherished, but it remains for us to recognise and appreciate what he went on to achieve.’* We can try, but it can be ...”

“... misery: it was to be April. What was rather more of a surprise was the Chancellor’s Budget: no penny off the basic rate of tax, but a new tax band of 20 per cent for the first £2000. Did no one remind him that Labour had tried much the same thing – a 25 per cent band when basic rate was 33 per cent – and that his party had eliminated it? At any ...”

“... to Mrs Thatcher’s political philosophy. Among the most unequivocal and uncritical of these are Nicholas Wapshott and George Brock (Thatcherism, 1983), who believe that she is a conviction politician guided by a deep-rooted moral code acquired early in life: ‘To explore the facts of her upbringing is to investigate the foundations of her philosophy ...”

“... It was made to preserve the memory of Thomas Greville, who ‘died in his tender age’ in 1492.Nicholas Orme is perhaps best known for Medieval Children, a lavishly illustrated survey published in 2001, which helped to popularise medievalists’ critique of Ariès. Tudor Children reuses some of the same material, but its implications are more ...”

“... his bicycle in Damascus, and cracked his skull. He went on picnics, he watched birds, played his penny whistle, tennis and chess. There is a scene in Cairo when he was recuperating from another spell in hospital – his horse had thrown him and then fallen on him and broken his leg. He was staying at his father’s villa in Cairo. Lord Moyne was then, summer ...”

“... solely to bring out new immigrants, now that transportation of convict labour was ending. Every penny spent on Aborigines was seen as a wasteful concession to a know-nothing government in Westminster. The Sydney Herald warned off Gipps with a reminder of Charles I’s fate. Somewhere in all this an independent Australian nation was evolving, but at what ...”

“... I am wholly preoccupied with the war between England and the Transvaal,’ Tsar Nicholas wrote to his sister at the outbreak of the Boer War. ‘Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line . . . I cannot conceal my joy at . . . yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full British battalions and a mountain battery were captured by the Boers!’ Britain’s hold on South Africa was significant for the Russians partly because the route to India lay via the Cape, and as Governors of the Cape were only too aware, Russia had its own designs on India ...”

“... figures; with the advent of cheap print, lists of parish dead were published on bills sold for a penny a piece. By 1603, London plague bills had weekly print runs of as many as six thousand copies (for a city with a population of about 141,000), giving parish-by-parish totals of plague deaths, general mortality and new christenings.People were terrified of ...”

“... by the prime minister. Our fearless leader is a democrat only as and when it suits him. 20 March. Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is ...”

“... and trade union circles to what you might call the arts-administrative class. It is echoed both by Nicholas Pearson, who is described in the blurb to his book as ‘Visual Arts Marketing Officer at the Welsh Arts Council’, and by Robert Hutchison, who ‘worked for five years as a Senior Research and Information Officer for the Arts Council’ and who seems ...”

“... was more than usually frantic and more than usually apologetic: but it was not entirely untypical. Nicholas Griffin, the editor of this volume, reckons that between forty and fifty thousand of Russell’s letters are held by the Bertrand Russell Archives at MacMaster University; the correspondence with Ottoline Morrell alone runs to about a thousand items on ...”

“... it came to finding a co-author for her own necessary thriller, State of Terror, she chose Louise Penny. According to an analysis of the Clintons’ tax returns, the couple made $240 million over the last fifteen years, much of it from writing. It doesn’t make them bad people, but it does, perhaps, make them very different from the people they used to ...”