Search Results

“... like The Fortunate Traveller (Derek Walcott), Sun Poem (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), Aegean Islands (Bernard Spencer) and Sun the First (Odysseus Elytis). Walcott confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ‘South’ (the Antilles and Greece), he ...”

“... to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd. know what I think of criticism in general & not try to arouse my interest with a perfectly innocuous ...”

“... as ‘a reliable guide to his practice’. There are essays on Leavis, the poets of the Forties (Bernard Spencer, Alun Lewis, G.S. Fraser), on the Catholic novel, on George Steiner; the book is not quite the integral study its title may suggest. I have nothing against such collections; a lot of good critical writing disappears because of a prejudice ...”

“... If Spencer Perceval is remembered at all today it’s probably as the answer to a question in a pub quiz: who is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious ...”

“... high among poems of the war. On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F.T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best things. It ...”

“... that “the only joy in life is to begin.”’ And Spender, in a late poem, wrote of MacNeice and Bernard Spencer: Each poem Is still a new beginning. If They had been finished though they would have died Before they died. MacNeice did have favourite forms and topics, and often flogged them hard. When he tried to break new ground, he was by no means ...”

“... Study of the Conjuring of a Spirit from the Play ‘Henry VI’, to which the bookseller Walter Spencer added the initials ‘W.B.’ in the belief that it was by William Blake. Spencer was prone to such improvements and, as the caption admits with a note of resignation, ‘other spurious signatures on original drawings ...”

“... and accuracies of the natural sciences. This is as true of the tedious volumes of Herbert Spencer, who needed a special chair, fitted with nails, to stop him falling asleep, as it is of Marxism. It holds, too, for the spate of scientific programmes, many of them German in origin, that were laid down for the attack on the final citadel: sex. Towards ...”

“... except with a hand mirror’), and made leery mock-bows at academic savants such as Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson (‘making us feel small, and breaking our heads for years with his “inis” and “iccios”’).This unflaggingly stylish and ebullient performance drew on a well-stocked wardrobe of roles. Early appearances regularly featured the ...”

“... and references. Among the ‘formative influences of my youth’, she herself cites Darwin, Spencer, Lecky and Taine; and allusions to works of science, history, art and philosophy crowd these pages almost as thickly as do passages of imaginative literature. ‘Alas, my Latin is too imperfect to permit any enjoyment of Lucretius, even with a ...”

“... proof that her faith in mesmeric treatment was an illusion. Later that same month, Thomas Spencer Wells, a prominent specialist in ovarian diseases, delivered a lecture on the case to the Clinical Society of London, in which he described the growth itself – displayed for the audience together with a specimen bottle of its contents – as common ...”

“... the shipwreck so briskly dealt with in the two recent biographies of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Robert Bernard Martin’s book, published last year, summarises the information in two competent pages. In Norman White’s Hopkins: A Literary Biography his comments on what happened, scattered passim through the relevant chapter, are even more cursory. Obviously ...”

“... career would be abruptly terminated in an angry wave of Jewish anti-Tory protest. Finchley, wrote Bernard Donoughue in 1964, ‘was the Liberal Party’s greatest and most publicised hope of “another Orpington” in the South-East of England’. The Liberals even arranged two special TV campaign appearances for their candidate, John Pardoe. All of this must ...”

“... Jolly Corner’; but whether or not he was thinking of his sister-in-law when he imagined Spencer Brydon’s return from the edge of death to feel himself ‘still propped and pillowed’ by the tender care of Alice Staverton, Henry was now more than ready for some propping and pillowing of his own. ‘I, who have no right to her,’ he wrote of ...”

“... forgetting that he had gone to Eton – just as some art lovers were to forget that Stanley Spencer had been to the Slade. So it is not easy to distinguish between the autobiographical ‘I’ and the storyteller’s ‘I’. When Penguin Books republished Down and Out in Paris and London during the war, the first printing was in the orange fiction ...”