Search Results

“... an unacknowledged arm of the Foreign Office. Garlake quotes a letter, first brought to light in Frances Donaldson’s history of the British Council, in which a member of the Foreign Office admitted that the Cold War ‘is in essence a battle for men’s minds’ and that ‘the British Council is one of our chief agencies for fighting it.’ From the ...”

“... but who had, I think, never met her). The ‘hey-ho’ was in fact part of the tears. One merit of Frances Spalding’s excellent critical biography is that it helps to restore to Stevie Smith her dignity. Her earlier biographers, Professors Jack Barbera and William McBrien (who also compiled the uncollected writings under the nauseating title Me ...”

“... by matchlight in the basement of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, messing about on the Cam. Frances Spalding sees the problem. She is perceptive on Period Piece’s sometimes artful, sometimes awkwardly contrived faux-naivety, and on its self-serving censorship and selectivity. She points out, for example, that the death of Raverat’s nanny from ...”

“... he had decided to cool it a little. ‘Visitors sometimes failed to notice this glass,’ Frances Spalding reports, late on in her commendably thorough dual biography. ‘John regarded this as a compliment and said he wished there were more opportunities to make such discreet interventions.’ To ‘Piper’ a building is to subject it to ...”

“... under scrutiny; and the Omega style is busting out all over. Its ‘vigorous vegetable growth’ (Frances Partridge’s description of Duncan Grant’s and Vanessa Bell’s decorations at Charleston) has been displayed and catalogued at the Crafts Council and Anthony d’Offay galleries. Judith Collins’s Omega Workshops gives the history, while ...”

“... into eccentricity and monomania, is one of the great gifts of British natural history to Britain. Frances Spalding makes the ups and downs of art in Britain seem gentle ones. This is only partly a side-effect of small illustrations and limited space. The half of her book which covers the years I have lived through is as evocative as a pile of old ...”

“... on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American ...”

“... Woolf had seen wearing the outfit. Garland thought it made Woolf look ‘supremely elegant’, Frances Spalding writes in the exhibition catalogue.* There was also a hat, presumably not the one Woolf was wearing when she went to see the latest Stravinsky ballet with Vita Sackville-West just before she visited Garsington, ‘a sort of top-hat made of ...”

“... who saw it when it first appeared in Penguin New Writing, or on book jackets and in magazines. Frances Spalding’s biography gives us the life with too many adjectives but an abundance of facts and first-hand accounts. She is tentative about the value of the work, which is understandable, and about the man, which seems unkind. The facts are not so ...”

“... return it enough to make some of the affair possible’ (Stansky doesn’t quote this letter; Frances Spalding does in her Life of Vanessa Bell). Vanessa read Pearl Buck, bought Chinese porcelain, ‘was observed poring over a map of China and teased for reading reports on the jute crop in the Times’.In the summer of 1936, when Bell had been in ...”

“... France. Then as slowly as any little local train it chugs through Lincolnshire past Sleaford and Spalding to Peterborough when at last it puts on speed and we’re back in London by 6.30. Not a wearisome journey at all. 1 November. Never having worked in the Olivier, coming in for the dress rehearsal for tonight and tomorrow night’s National Theatre Gala ...”