Search Results

“... condemned.However, matters have not become as dull as this implies, as references to Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, now Lord Dacre (or Lord Dakar, as the Argentinian papers call him), demonstrate. Taylor is actually quite forgiving about the fact that Trevor-Roper and not he was awarded the Regius Professorship after Suez: he asserts that ...”

“... clear, compact, memorable, touching, and yet entirely decorous – with the added attraction, as Hugh Honour astutely points out in The Image of the Black, of hinting at conversion as well as emancipation. Indeed, Honour concludes that, for all the Society’s admirable intentions and great achievements – which he concedes with some reluctance – the very ...”

“... seen out of pubs.’ ‘There is not a single living man of letters with less moral courage than Thomas Stearns Eliot.’ He was theatrical, with bushy raised eyebrows, a fondness for dramatic pauses and a way of literally dropping his jaw at some critical misjudgment. To us, the presumed faithful, he was courteous and solicitous, but it was rare for anyone ...”

“... photographs would give insights into madness. In the pictures of psychiatric patients taken by Hugh Diamond in the 1870s, the girls look less mad than trapped; they could be acting the part of one of Dickens’s wild, angry young women. Forbidden and shocking images proliferated. Pornographers found photography a lucrative medium (although there is nothing ...”

“... execute all things. Both the word and the island of Utopia were the teasing inventions of Sir Thomas More. More’s vision of the good place which is no place may have been inspired by the voyages of Columbus’s follower Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela and, absurdly, managed to adorn with his name both of the continents of the New ...”

“... whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la lettre. A ...”

“... rather than to domesticate Prynne – that Donald Davie devoted a section of his 1972 Thomas Hardy and British Poetry to a discussion of Prynne’s contexts, and much of the best criticism of Prynne since has seen him as a writer bristling with contexts. Prynne is mentioned as an enabling presence in Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s ...”

“... a book called The Good Years, about the decade before the sinking. In Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage, Hugh Brewster places the Titanic squarely in its era. (Brewster is a big player in Titanic’s media world – as his cover blurb says, he has ‘25 years’ experience’ in creating books about her.) Robber barons, richer than their fellow citizens to a degree ...”

“... historians, provoking extreme explanations for such ostensibly bizarre beliefs. For Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in 1967, this involved an appeal to the atmospherics of the precarious Alpine settings in which some of our ancestors lived. Their curious witchcraft fantasies, he suggested, might be traced to the swirling mists and rarified air of ...”

“... of Wadham. He was already a controversial figure who had, as we all knew, crossed swords with Hugh Trevor-Roper over the state of the Elizabethan aristocracy and with Geoffrey Elton over the question of Tudor despotism. Stone’s favourite theme at that time was ‘The Coming of the English Revolution’. Looking back from the later 17th century, Lord ...”

“... by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income from royalties, has a protagonist, Archbishop Thomas Becket, who shares his first name with Eliot. In 1934 the name-loving Eliot went to some trouble to import to the Faber offices in Russell Square a nameplate that had belonged to one of his grandfathers – ‘T. Stearns’ – and had it ‘put up on the ...”

“... on democracy in our part of the globe in particular, PhD students, Michael Walzer fans, Thomas Jefferson fans etc. The civilian casualties were hardly mentioned, as in the US, though our media are not quite as bad as theirs. We were never shown the ‘disturbing pictures’. Instead, every evening Israelis could watch the former head of the Air ...”

“... but ashes and clay – to be radically permeable. Pilgrims to Canterbury drank holy water from St Thomas Becket’s shrine because it was thought to be mixed with his blood; they chewed the melted wax or burnt wicks of the candles that lay before the altar. St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was so holy that he took a bite out of ...”

“... to ‘get closer to Germany’. No sooner had Chamberlain appointed him than he tried to get Jim Thomas, Eden’s PPS, to be his spy in the FO, reporting back secretly. Worse, Chamberlain used his bungling, pro-Fascist sister-in-law, Dame Ivy Chamberlain, as his unofficial envoy to Mussolini, repeatedly undercutting Eden. As Attlee put it, Chamberlain was ...”

“... marble busts on the walls. I noticed Ascherson was taking his time over an inscription to the poet Thomas Campbell, and some words of Campbell’s began to echo somewhere in my head, two lines from The Pleasures of Hope. ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, And robes the mountain in its azure hue. Not good lines, but they seemed good enough as I ...”