Search Results

“... almost a Breughel before its time.Quite often the beasts in the pictures try to climb out. As Elizabeth Morrison points out in her essay, it was difficult to get everything in, and artists had to collaborate with their scribes. A manuscript from St Petersburg contains a picture of a yale, a creature described by Pliny as a kind of antelope ‘the ...”

“... first published as a volume in 1988, and now expanded and updated to include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood remarks that the writers have been brought together ‘over what, in some cases, would be their dead bodies’. Dorothy Parker, for instance, says she is ‘a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex ... But when we ...”

“... to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a wife to do. Elizabeth Longford, in her introduction, describes this as a characteristic blend of ‘cold calculation and sensitive consideration’. The book consists of extracts from Curzon’s Tales of Travel, Russia in Central Asia and Leaves from a Viceroy’s Notebook ...”

“... work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They appeared in these ...”

“... into’ or the progress from eiders to eiderdown. Such lines and shorelines bring to mind Elizabeth Bishop, littered as they are with correspondences – a turtle like ‘a covered wagon’ or the ocean ‘wrinkling like tinfoil’. She lays the paint on more thickly than Bishop: but can she rise to the grandiloquence of ‘At the Fishhouses’? At ...”

“... like hundreds of others. Yet it is to this terrain that the almost unbearable nostalgia of Van Morrison’s music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in. But the bridges of Morrison’s music ...”

“... was unknown. But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty ...”

“... age of 12 he was a Page of Honour to George V and in the late 1940s Private Secretary to Princess Elizabeth. From Harrow, and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic service the year before Munich, and thoroughly approved Chamberlain’s course of action. A straightforward Anglican and Conservative, loyal to his family and background, Colville ...”

“... indicates a high degree of expertise in the author. Ancient Enemies is a new departure for Elizabeth North. She has, before, left tantalising trails of unexpected connections and consequences; she has also, notably in Everything in the Garden, proved that she can produce a masterly pastiche of period speech and behaviour. Here she has done both of ...”

“... in the whole of England and Wales. At least as important, she formed a life-long friendship with Elizabeth Macadam, a strong, independent Scot who was to share her houses and be her main emotional support through life. Pedersen deals sensitively and well with this relationship as far as she is able – for both women went to extraordinary lengths to destroy ...”

“... only Bibles to do so were its Tudor ancestors which were given official status by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I: first the Great Bible of 1539, making the announcement on the title page of its 1541 edition, and then the fairly light revision of the Great Bible undertaken in the 1560s by the Elizabethan episcopate. This Bishops’ Bible took up the label of ...”

“... with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump the housework on ‘full-time help’. There are so many examples of this sort that it would be funny if it weren’t ...”

“... a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out for appropriation in 1983:This is a white woman’s attempt – respectful, I believe – to speak through a Black woman’s voice. A risky undertaking, and it ...”

“... Jarrell quotes Cocteau’s advice to poets: learn what you can do, and then don’t do it.) Blake Morrison has drawn attention to the way Heaney likes to use the last poem of one book to suggest the nature of its successor, a pattern skilfully maintained over many books, beguiling his readers with a glimpse of the future. At the same time, though, in myself ...”

“... efforts. National camaraderie was bolstered by making important figures seem ordinary – Princess Elizabeth in her ATS uniform stripping down an engine – while ordinary people were made heroic. The fire-watcher and the air-raid warden appeared on posters picked out in silhouette as guardian angels haloed by a night sky full of fire and searchlights. Women ...”