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“... Appearing unannounced in 1977, Charles Johnston’s verse rendering of Eugene Onegin established itself immediately as the best English translation of Pushkin’s great poem there had yet been. It was an impressive performance even to those who could not read the original. To those who could, it was simply astonishing, not least from the technical angle: Johnston had cast his Onegin in the Onegin stanza, a form almost impossibly difficult in English, and had got away with it ...”

“... is not an ornament for the horror but the exact measure of its unspeakability. Sir Charles Johnston, a distinguished retired diplomat, is probably best-known to readers as the translator of the recently Penguined Eugene Onegin, said to be the best English version of Pushkin’s poem. The title of his new book comes from a review by Clive ...”

“... Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in the building, and the intended ...”

“... wholly different life-style and sensibility. A much more old-fashioned stylisation is achieved by Charles Johnston, who writes with verve and elegance in many forms. Expressing admiration for Lowell’s Life Studies, he produces his own version about his own past, his schooldays and episodes from his time en poste abroad, combining these in a little ...”

“... war and to fix a French taint to the movement to reform a thoroughly corrupt parliament. Kenneth Johnston’s Unusual Suspects are men and women who fell foul of ‘Pitt’s determination to crush his domestic opponents’ and whose lives, careers, reputations were irrevocably damaged as a result. They were members of a brilliant generation of imaginative ...”

“... them. Academic critics are often enamoured of Wordsworth’s youthful allegiances. Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth is almost mystically committed to the idea of his youth. Its prologue declares that, with all the reverence (and matching irreverence) the poet has inspired, there is one image, or story, that we have not seen fully – young ...”

“... resisting it. The boy in question was probably Barbauld’s adopted son (and 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 ...”

“... the sonnet-stanza of Pushkin’s original poem, which is miraculously and fluidly preserved in Charles Johnston’s translation in the Penguin Classics. One would not think that feminine rhyme and tetrameter, which in the English tradition are usually associated with light verse, would be suitable media for a story which I knew would contain both ...”

“... the lot. By the Thirties the achievements of Arts and Crafts revivalism were petering out: Edward Johnston and Eric Gill look good, calligraphy after Johnston aimless, laboured and weak. Craft pottery and commercial pottery both stand up very well. Furniture, either in the Gimson tradition, of beautifully-finished joinery ...”

“... Smith remembered Bradley and Cooper visiting his sister’s home and admiring a picture by Charles Condor hanging on a wall. Since they thought the work ‘expressed in a way they felt unique the inspiration of their life’, they swiftly concluded that it ‘belonged to them; and when they left the cottage they took it with them and hung it in their ...”

“... Carby moves into the archives.Was Beatrice in the audience when the Scottish-born missionary James Johnston lectured on ‘Jamaica: The New Riviera’ in Bristol in 1903? Fruit steamers had recently begun to import bananas from Jamaica to Avonmouth and it was thought that this trade, along with the growth in tourism, would revive the ailing Jamaican economy ...”

“... press as the inventor of ‘zigzag writing’ after a remark in the introductory note by Edward Johnston, a founding father of modern calligraphy. Richardson’s ideas were ‘child-centred’ but she wasn’t a pushover. Pupils who forgot their paintbox were sent to sit in the garden (‘you can go to the devil for all I care’). Hensher loves her for the ...”

“... of the newly amalgamated Underground Electric Railways Company briefed the calligrapher Edward Johnston and his pupil Eric Gill to create a symbol and a typeface that would give visual identity to the unified network. The Johnston Sans lettering and red, white and blue roundel of the London Underground marked the ...”

“... The bulk of the book is set in the generation before it, from the years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in 1642. ‘Cavalier’ meant more things after 1642 than before it. It was in the mid-winter of 1641-42, in the crisis which turned on the king’s entry into the House of Commons in an attempt to seize five of its leading ...”

“... employment (having first aced an exam about land revenue collection) at India House. Ineffectual Charles Lamb was already there, his essayist persona ‘Elia’ having already written about what working in the adjacent South Sea House was like decades before. The East India Company was a powerhouse of idealistic utilitarianism. Peacock began in the ...”