Search Results

“... can be constructed in a museum, the most satisfying publication on sale at the exhibition is Elizabeth Brown’s book of Brancusi’s photographs. The studio photographs are also reproduced in the catalogue, often facing colour plates of the same subjects, made in the technically brilliant high-key manner perfected for the photography of ...”

“... in response to MacKinnon’s claim that the eponymous act of the original film was dangerous. Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker, described her, with a ‘tight white face and 19th-century hairdo’ making ‘her look like Carry Nation on the South Beach diet’, launching into ‘a tirade about how Inside Deep Throat had failed to point out that ...”

“... market, and the wish to maintain his useful friendships with W.D. Howells, the originator, and Elizabeth Jordan, the editor, of the strange Harper’s project. If these are plausible causes for James’s involvement, however, they don’t seem wholly to account for the way in which, when his turn came, the creative James showed an intense engagement with ...”

“... family both within the narrative and outside it. Howells’s letter to the magazine’s editor, Elizabeth Jordan, has not survived, but according to Jordan, it ‘almost scorched the paper it was written on’: ‘Don’t, don’t let her ruin our beautiful story!’ Howells’s original proposal for The Whole Family had devoted more attention to its ...”

“... of the new English-speaking aristocracy that had ousted the old Irish-speaking one. ‘Valentine Brown’, as these purists saw it, was the sort of ludicrous name an arriviste landowner might call himself – someone who’d installed himself in a demesne of the great McCarthys, now dead or dispersed. In this world, the speaker of ‘cunning ...”

“... by Geza Vermes I’d have advised anybody showing an interest in these matters to consult Raymond Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah, a work of some six hundred pages which, like all Brown’s numerous publications, is a monument to his indefatigable though sometimes fatiguing scholarship. ...”

“... hemmed in to the north by hills. The atmosphere was already thickening in Tudor times, as Queen Elizabeth declared herself ‘greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass ...”

“... fleet consisting of an aircraft carrier and supporting vessels). The aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest warship ever built for the British navy, is due to come into service in 2021 if not before; Williamson sees it entering the South China Sea in a matter of years.If these plans are realised, Britain’s naval prowess will be greater than at ...”

“... On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation ...”

“... around his life. Something similar might be said of the woman William married – Lucy Madox Brown, the daughter of Ford Madox Brown and his first wife, Elizabeth Bromley. Lucy seems to have been pushed to the side when Elizabeth died. Relations ...”

“... a warning. Still, you wonder, is there really anything more to say? The answer is no, but Tina Brown and Sarah Bradford soldier on nevertheless. Each of them has produced hundreds of pages based on books already written (by journalists, her friends, his friends, butlers, nannies, ex-employers, protection officers, a speech trainer, lovers, paparazzi) and ...”

“... web of a novel in which the reader, too, is irresistibly caught. In J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren, a retired Classics lecturer, is dying of cancer in Cape Town. When, in her bedridden state, she thinks of her house as a ‘late bourgeois tomb’, she is doubtless signalling that she has read or heard of Nadine Gordimer’s work. Though it is ...”

“... in his much less enjoyable The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery (Little, Brown, £16.99). His first mistake is to attempt a definition rather than rely on examples. He suggests that a snob is someone who observes ‘a distinction made for the wrong reason’ or makes judgments based on ‘false values’ but this is a circular ...”

“... world Perry’s exhibition looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than the photographs. Sickert’s ...”

“... this what we are to call Coetzee’s third-person, present-tense autobiographies, for instance, or Elizabeth Costello’s lectures? – but it has implications for all the labels used in literary criticism. Take the designation ‘late Modernist’, which David Attwell, one of Coetzee’s most astute early champions, applied to his fiction in the 1990s. Though ...”