Search Results

“... written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored. The enterprise in any ...”

“... sank in the South Atlantic, midway between St Helena and Tristan da Cunha. The captain, Tom Dudley, and a crew of three named Stephens, Brooks and Parker drifted on a dinghy for 1050 miles in 24 days, until they were rescued by the German barque Moctezuma some nine hundred and ninety ...”

“... In an area of dairy pasture a few miles from Coventry, there is a bench formed from one half of a large clinker-built rowing boat sticking vertically out of the ground, with a sturdy wooden seat placed within the hull so that it is sheltered as if by an arbour. There is no water in sight except a definitely non-navigable stream ...”

“... shorter, less obviously ambitious work. The brief, lovely, Salingeresque coming-of-age tale Five Miles from Outer Hope (2000) preceded her next big one, Behindlings (2002); Clear (2004), a furious defence of David Blaine’s 44-day exhibition of hunger artistry at Tower Bridge, interrupted the composition of Darkmans (2007); and Burley Cross Postbox Theft ...”

“... monument in succession, carrying over his shoulder a life-size ventriloquist’s dummy called Dudley, weighted with bricks. As the tale progresses, Dudley joins in the sex and takes over the narration, which gradually disintegrates in an elegant medley of old-style Modernism: ‘A man no longer called Alan came to ...”

“... been relatively little progress in the collection of the kind of statistics that he needs since L. Dudley Stamp prepared his pioneering land utilisation survey in the 1930s. Marion Shoard is no less sensitive to what Alice Coleman (director of the second land use survey) has called ‘the galloping consumption’ of agricultural land for other purposes, but ...”

“... vices and the effect he has on other people’. The actress Colette O’Neil, wife of the actor Miles Malleson, wrote a novel à clef in which a character based on T.S. Eliot called Russell ‘a man exhausting other men by his intellect; exhausting women by his intensity; wearing out his friends, sucking them dry, passing from person to person, never giving ...”

“... dazzling white. While daisies, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles. The sky a pure, dark blue, and the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with white butterflies; your clothes were covered with butterflies. It was like an enchanted land; but in the place of ...”

“... a verdict of not proven: she had been ably defended by Henry Cockburn. A bad business; Owen Dudley Edwards calls it mass murder. Blackwood’s Magazine made it even worse than it was, adding atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) appears to have been ...”

“... in the Second World War. This occurred at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, a small port some hundred miles south-west of Dunkirk. It is often said that the French, acting unilaterally, gave up fighting, and, carrying white flags, marched in front of the 51st Highland Division, thereby preventing them from firing at the Germans. Warner explains the extraordinary ...”

“... palaeontological studies of trilobites. The commonest trilobite from the famous Silurian rocks at Dudley is called Calymene blumenbachii, and here I learn that Blumenbach was one of the leading naturalists of his day, the author of a standard textbook, and one of those who introduced history into geognosy by clearly distinguishing past worlds from the ...”

“... so the soggy, sentimental myth-message about Scottish soldiers, high roads, low roads and longest miles back would tell us. The only Scot in Hardy’s fiction is called Farfrae – it is his ethnic destiny to be far from home, a native even less capable of return than Clym Yeobright. Other émigrés and déracinés seem to manage it better. Raymond ...”

“... then I bought a bike, and went on a cycling and reading holiday to St Ives over the new year. Then Dudley Winter-bottom, Secretary of the Chelsea Arts Club, Tim Hilton, biographer of Ruskin, and Ian Tyson, artist, joined us, and the Artists’ Cycling Club was formed at a Little Chef somewhere in Surrey. Now we have club jerseys in navy and cerise with a ...”

“... Government and Religion.Even Swift sometimes struggled with Pope, and wondered what readers twenty miles from London would make of The Dunciad, with its teeming, perplexing density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did ...”

“... into speculations about a hidden love life – usually in terms of relations with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, or even Thomas Seymour, her abuser when she was 14. Once initiated, fantasies of this kind, which began to appear at the end of the 17th century with such prose works as The Secret History of the most ...”