Search Results

“... scientists, lawyers and the military on every continent. This is the central subject of Clare Anderson’s big, important, well-researched and necessarily imperfect Convicts: A Global History. ‘Punitive mobility’, as she terms it, was practised in the ancient world, not least in the Roman Empire. The story she tells, however, begins in the ...”

“... often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, John had ...”

“... that contains the secret of his birth is misdirected; Tess writes a letter of confession to Angel Clare, but it slips beneath the carpet and is never delivered. Letters have been an uncertain way to communicate in fiction. But the e-mails that have appeared in recent novels are no more reliable: Emily Piper, the skittish heroine of Sylvia Brownrigg’s The ...”

“... of these anthologies, no other major British publisher has challenged their dominance.What does Clare Bucknell mean by ‘British culture’? The first chapter of The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture covers a four-volume series of anthologies, Poems on Affairs of State, published from 1689 until 1707. The editors included ...”

“... on the roof or squeezed into a windowbox full of cinders or on the corrugated iron roof of an Anderson shelter, ideal for sun-loving, shallow-rooted plants. In the manner of a ‘history from below’, The Gardens of the British Working Class wants to celebrate gardening’s ‘unsung heroes’. John Hufton, a stocking-maker of the 1850s, was one of many ...”