Search Results

“... and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country, ‘and fuels an almost obsessive desire for low-density, suburban homes.’ What happened, they ask, to ‘the English love of cities’? Should we blame the town planner Ebenezer Howard for the love affair ...”

“... always look for the organisation of the court. In examining Thomas Cromwell’s relations with Anne Boleyn and with the Privy Chamber, he has made it very hard indeed to see the rise of Thomas Cromwell as marking the beginning of modern bureaucracy. His evidence, as Sir Geoffrey Elton has admitted, makes some substantial holes in Elton’s notion of a ...”

“... reaping the profits of a business. To accomplish this double manoeuvre, as we learn from Anne Sebba’s book, she had to find a man who would not only be a clever business partner but a dominating sort of husband, for whom she could play The Angel while managing refractory children household and business accounts, creative projects and inner ...”

“... By then Lowell had completed his first year at Harvard and was engaged to Parker’s cousin Anne Dick. That year’s programme included studying 75 Elizabethan plays; Anne, who didn’t set foot on this Mount Athos, was told to read Troilus and Cressida and post her comments. Lowell returned them with tart ...”

“... differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you.’ This ...”

“... revolution of 1688 was impossible without this companion feminisation of fashion.’ Men’s power was now proclaimed in ‘sumptuary renunciation rather than sumptuary law’, and ‘the new regime’s elites claimed modesty as their own.’ In the 19th century, the old aristocracy of gentry and commercial elite had to give way to the advances of a ...”

“... as Cromwell. Nor was the monarch meant to be a figurehead. It was his job to govern; executive power was vested in him: it was for him to formulate policies and to order them to be carried out. This did not mean that he was to exercise arbitrary power. In coming to important decisions he was supposed to ask for ...”

“... interested in the life and death of just one. The usual, if sensational, explanation is that Anne Boleyn was a woman of unconventional but irresistible charm, with exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark ...”

“... to occupy the English throne. Yet, during a long reign of 44 years, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn contrived to steer a middle course in religion between the beliefs of her Catholic subjects on the one hand and clamorous Puritans on the other (the so-called Elizabethan Settlement), evade fatal entanglements, whether marital or military, on the ...”

“... position to be in. [pause] Air! Wind! World! Collate my bones! I am what most people talk about, a power spot. I stole fire, I knew what I was doing. That was last week. I’m bored again. Enter Chorus. Hah, I smell you! Talk! CHORUS: How strangely beautiful your driveway in the dawn. But why blue and why you? PROM: Govt wanted to enforce an analogy between ...”

“... she is. And she is powerful. Flanking her are her four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Henrietta and Anne. She would marry two of them off to dukes, and two of them to earls. And when the time came, she would net as partners for her seven granddaughters five dukes, an earl and a viscount. As for her husband and son, she would outlive them both by years. Viewed ...”

“... and other interests against the advice of their male relatives, independently exercised cultural power and even openly questioned male prerogatives in their writing. Writing Women in Jacobean England draws its evidence from the books and careers of nine Jacobean women, devoting a chapter to each and arranging them in three sections: ‘The Royal ...”

“... This one is 572 pages long and it took the author twenty years to write. Longer than Katherine Anne Porter found to write the whole of her resplendent work. Joan Givner’s book might be called light plane reading, except that it is heartlessly grave, gravid though fruitless, and would take the most receptive astronauts a moon-flight to try to sleep ...”

“... were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body ...”

“... the springboard of credibility from which to leap to its much larger vote in 1987. The bargaining power thus achieved was used to win the electoral reform that has transformed the political scene.’ Readers will, I hope, have no difficulty in recognising the aspirations of five sets of people: respectively, the Thatcherite Tories, the Tory wets, the Hard ...”