Search Results

“... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty ...”

“... for her pregnancy in 1569 and claimed to have given birth to a cat. The champion cad was Francis Lane, who in 1608 promised to marry Rose Arnold, got her pregnant, tried to push her down a well and claimed another man was the father. Rose ‘wandered up and down in Northamptonshire until I was delivered of childbirth’: she lost the baby, but still wanted ...”

“... and disarmament, cheap newspapers and the penny post. He is a worthy subject for canonisation. Anthony Howe’s comprehensive, erudite and superbly annotated edition of his correspondence will take its place alongside Gladstone’s diaries, the letters of Carlyle and Disraeli, and John Stuart Mill’s collected works as an indispensable resource for ...”

“... to Hollywood. Back in England she fell ‘instantly’ in love with the 33-year-old film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, marrying him three years later. They had two sons; the older one had Down’s syndrome and the other is a judge. She never criticised Havelock-Allan, but David, evidently rightly, thinks he was ‘a selfish husband and a ...”

“... On 10 January 1957 the momentous news reached the family publishing house in St Martin’s Lane. ‘Mr Macmillan has just been made prime minister,’ his elder brother Daniel was told by an excited secretary. ‘No, “Mr Macmillan” has not been made prime minister,’ the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has ...”

“... that Adams was guilty? And if we don’t, why does he get an entry? Wickedness, in the case of Anthony Blunt, actually pays off rather handsomely. He gets a four-column entry against the average two, and it is unlikely that this would have been his lot had he been listed merely as ‘art historian’ and not also as ‘a communist spy’. (Donald ...”

“... sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her ...”

“... on her paper ‘Cinderella Organises Buttons’. She cowered in the pub lavatory to escape Anthony Barnett, who had been detailed by the board to fetch her, while he stood outside demanding that she come out and discuss her article ‘rationally and politically’. A week later the board received her letter of resignation, which suggested that ‘they ...”

“... stretched beneath a pallOf melancholy that would leaveSomething of its gloom behind ...Or Anthony Thwaite:Now what you feared so long has got you too.The blankness has descended where you lieDeep in that building you already knew ...Or Steve Ellis:Hull was the global meridianall poetry was measured from;and now you’re gone, a flat blank gapempty as ...”

“... In Anthony Burgess’s latest novel, Earthly Powers, there is a parody of a Betjeman poem. Thus kneeling at the altar rail We ate the word’s white papery wafer. Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer. But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel’s food. In a brilliant piece of word play the angel food cake of the children’s tea-party becomes the Host: sex, worship and childhood come together on the tip of the darting tongue that demurely holds it ...”

“... Nye Bevan called Hugh Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur ...”

“... earlier chapters is a dry telling of the story of his temporary devotion to the theories of Homer Lane and ‘Loony’ Layard: Refusal to make use of one’s creative powers could lead to cancer. Stubbornness found physical expression as stiffness of the joints, the deaf and the blind were attempting to shut out the physical world, and Stephen Spender was so ...”

“... the Crown to contend that the conviction of any appellant was either safe or satisfactory.’ Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, went further. Delivering the court’s judgment, he said that ‘the officers must have lied,’ and that ‘if they were prepared to tell this sort of lie, then the whole of their evidence becomes suspect.’ He continued: ‘It is ...”

“... lanes’ of North Devon, the location of the dead badger and an allusion perhaps to the sunken lane in Dorset used as a hideout by the hero of Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male (turned into a TV movie starring Peter O’Toole). In The Secret Hours, the man who’s been hiding out in Devon for years under the alias Max Janáček doesn’t seek ...”

“... category. Among them are Susan Browne, ‘taken in bed with a Scotsman in a common bawdy house’; Anthony Horne, tailor, ‘locked up in a shed in Chiswell Street with Margery Blague in the night, and apprehended by the constable’; Henry Manne, gentleman, ‘complained to be a very disordered fellow, and keeping company with Alice Sherwood, a common ...”