Search Results

“... We are now well into the Great Vegetable Revolution. ‘For the majority of the population,’ writes Jane Grigson, ‘vegetables as a delight, to be eaten on their own, belong to this century, even to the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth were more than mere adjuncts to flesh ...”

“... mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem society. In Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, also the product of an interracial relationship, passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives – James Weldon-Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), for example – is their resistance ...”

“... Lisa St Aubin de Teran’s The Slow Train to Milan and Clare Boylan’s Holy Pictures share a subject – girls growing up to a world whose language is new to them – which demands close attention to the register of words and sentences, a measure of novelty and an enactment of surprise. Many of their sentences glint with recognitions, giving back a fine pleasure out of the often painful misunderstandings and reverses they render ...”

“... they want to about her race, and pulls them into conflict. In the novella, the woman who passes, Clare Kendry, is beautiful, gorgeously dressed and reckless: she’ll introduce her racist husband to her black friends; she’ll turn up unannounced and if no one’s home, hang out with the servants; she’ll seduce her friend’s husband, as if there could be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the consultant and they begin an affair; but it is a let-down when she starts to creep to Lloyd Walker, his hideous boss, suggesting a new corporate strategy at a breakfast meeting. And there is a twist in the story when the narrator works late at the office and checks his e-mail: ‘For all my newfound computer skills, formatting, scrolling and saving, I ...”

“... according to his own deeply unreliable saga, Hrolfr, known as Göngu-Hrolfr, or ‘Hrolf the Walker’, because he was so big that no horse could carry him). There is no doubt that what is now Normandy did receive a large number of Scandinavian settlers: as many as a hundred place names derive from Norse personal names, including La ...”

“... about names suggests concealment of origins and uncertainty of identity. Jane Clairmont became Clare, then Claire, sometimes Clara, and added Constantia. Her mother married William Godwin twice in an afternoon, once as ‘Jane Clairmont, widow’, a second time as ‘Mary Vial, spinster’. She brought two children to the marriage, almost certainly by ...”

“... for the pedestrian quality of her prose, and as vigorously defended. In her defence, for example, Clare Hanson argued in 1990 that the inert language of The Good Terrorist should be read in the same way that we read Joyce’s ‘tired style’ at the end of Ulysses: Lessing’s book ‘is a grey and textureless novel because it is “about”, or speaks, a ...”

“... scuttles away, rucksack on stooped shoulders, distancing himself from his earlier disguise as wall-walker, acrobat; a workaday man of the crowd. But even with the rucksack – wrong colour, wrong shape – the man stands out: too furtive, too fiercely concentrated, fleeing the scene rather than jogging or striding like the fortunate denizens of the ...”

“... is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir ...”

“... beginning to swallow up all the agricultural land between the city centre and the villages John Clare knew. Peterborough has already accepted, at a price, the forcibly migrated rough sleepers of Cambridge. Its reward is public housing gifted by remote Kensington developers.When​ I reached the Thames, coming away from Abbey Wood station, I was reminded of ...”

“... The vision of Pacific America from the high peaks. He was, from the start, a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, when he was a schoolboy and young student, over academic work. At the age of 15, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when ...”

“... to make this landscape one of abiding importance to Beckett, who, like his father, was a great walker. These early letters make clear that, despite his lack of interest in Ireland or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to McGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic ...”