Search Results

“... new ideas to people like Menocchio. An Italian translation of the 14th-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville revealed to him the existence of the quite different civilisations and religions of Islam, India and China. He also probably read the Koran, of which an Italian translation appeared in Venice in 1547. This is another example of the republic’s ...”

“... world had tea, but it was so different as to seem unrelated. On Sundays, sometimes, my father took me to tea at the Ritz, another kind of ceremony. Thick carpet, silver teapots, tinkling china, high-rise cake stands, doilies and, I only later understood, the possibility of catching the eye of a divorced or widowed woman with a little cash in the bank. My ...”

“... John McGahern is an extraordinary writer of charm and violence. His most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), has a looseness and a gaiety which it took him nearly seventy years to allow himself. His earlier work marked him as one of the great writers of claustrophobia ...”

“... something rather different about the Spring Gardens, as they were originally known, at Vauxhall. John Evelyn, an early visitor, described the site in July 1661 as ‘a pretty contriv’d plantation’. The trees there were said to be a hundred years old in 1661. The gardens offered ‘a universal withdrawing room for the city’, as Borg and Coke put it, the ...”

“... of democracy and with it the BBC and Patten. In 1997, Murdoch was more interested in wrecking John Major’s media legislation than anything else, and had procured from Tony Blair a promise that once in power he would dilute any such legislation. McKnight also argues – convincingly – that were Murdoch interested only in the opinion polls he would have ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... position to propagate Catholic views, and he returned to England in 1856, where he was asked by John Henry Newman to go to Dublin, with the prospect of becoming professor of English literature at Newman’s new Catholic university. It was a disaster for Julia, Arnold’s wife, but ” to Newman it felt like a providential coup: the son of the leading ...”

“... biological nephew) Charles Rochemont Aikin, who bore his mother’s maiden name as his surname and took his father’s first name as his middle name. (Miss Aikin married Rochemont Barbauld, a teacher of Huguenot descent, in 1774.) Such latticework sums up the complex, loving and productive exchanges of the Aikins, a brilliantly adaptable clan of rational ...”

“... or deport gay people from Ireland. Tom Inglis’s book deals with the ways in which Catholicism took root in Ireland. ‘It was peculiar to Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘and it was to have a lasting effect, that the whole civilising process took place in and through the Catholic Church. Due to the absence of a native rural ...”

“... This was not some panicky ‘collateral damage’ fire-fight: the men of Charlie Company took a long time to dishonour and dismember the women, round up and despatch the children and make the rest of the villagers lie down in ditches while they walked up and down shooting them. Not one of the allegedly ‘searing’ films about the war – not ...”

“... authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that even the ...”

“... man, though hardly to redeem him. Purdy’s early stories have nothing so fierce to show. He took more risks in his first novel, the picaresque-satirical Malcolm (1959), but his novel-writing career amounts to a series of lurches towards explicitness and even extremity, alternating with retreats to safer ground. His second novel, The Nephew (1961), is ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this comparative disregard lasted well into the war years. His ‘As I please’ column in Tribune amused and irritated, the articles on boys’ weeklies and vulgar comic postcards were a novel approach to popular culture, but they ...”

“... of whom were beaten, tortured or raped; and that an exodus from the country of roughly two million took place – most of them people who thought their lives were in danger. Two among the thousands of case-histories investigated by the Commission provide proof and symbol of the kind of crimes that were being committed while a not entirely ignorant world looked ...”