Search Results

“... is a surname that invites teasing. Yet it was important to her, too, that the initials, H.D., ‘had no identity attached; they could have been pure spirit.’ ‘H.D.’ became her, a sigil, an emblem, an anchoring sign as she cycled among ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian and modern masks, a hieratic spondee of self-evident presence.Many of her poems are ...”

“... Edward Godfree Aldington’s early gestures of rebellion was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a taste for velvet jackets and bow ties; he ...”

“... the publication in London of the first Vorticist magazine, Blast. Since January that year, there had been the threat of insurrection from the Ulster rebels; 937 strikes; 107 arson attacks by suffragettes (who also slashed Velásquez and Sargent paintings in the National Gallery); only four days earlier the Archduke Franz Ferdinand ...”

“... at 19 Berggasse under the name of science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this ...”

“... of Paris. ‘She wanted to show me something very unusual and extraordinary which very few people had ever seen.’ When they got to a ‘curious little neighbourhood place near the Arc de Triomphe’, Barney told her chauffeur to stop the car. They walked ‘for the longest time and finally we came to an ordinary pension (at least from the outside) and ...”

“... As a boy, Robert Duncan had a recurring dream. He would imagine himself in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One … a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance ...”

“... John Alexander’s piece on the Paris period would have made livelier and easier reading if he had not, like Richard Humphreys on the London years, limited himself so self-effacingly to the documentation, necessary thought that is. The problem, for instance, of Pound’s admiration for Brancusi, and of how that fits or does not fit with his other ...”

“... as he came out of the elevator that morning. He was alone. He flicked his eyes on me, off me. He had a furtive tinge and a swank black overcoat – I thought at once of Joseph Conrad, as he is in formal photographs, with the not-quite-Western eyes and virtuosic goatee.Once I attended a christening at a farmhouse in a country far away. I saw a stack of white ...”

“... historian. She seems to have lived very comfortably, in Washington DC and New York City. She had two children. She travelled widely. All this is vaguely sketched because she was herself immune to confessional impulses. Her friend the poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge remembers: ‘When she suffered a concussion in a mugging on the stairs of her studio in the ...”

“... as ‘Daughter of Madwoman’, or ‘Madwoman Meets the Lost Generation’, raised questions they had not had to confront in dealing with the more established writers of the Victorian Golden Age. Which writers among an enormous group would they choose to discuss in a modern canon still in flux? How could they achieve ...”

“... visible. By looking out of the corner of her eye, Woolf understood the film in front of her. She had been thinking about cinema for a long time before she wrote this essay. She complains in a 1918 review that a novel by Compton Mackenzie moves too fast, like a movie, with one image relentlessly following another. Yet by the time she wrote Jacob’s Room in ...”

“... she was young and not famous her family saved her letters; later on people kept some because she had become rather famous, and then a great many because she had become very famous. Correspondents, some as famous as she was, treasured every word she wrote them. There survive a hundred letters to Ezra Pound and another ...”

“... of the other parts ends with lines which, as Sisson puts it, ‘might not have existed if I had not lived through the time in question’. The effect of the reverse chronology is complex. The usual forward movement of an autobiography or biography, even when we know or can predict the story, gives a sense of progressive development, of movement towards ...”

“... Locke’s The New Negro and Langston Hughes’s participation in the Crisis magazine could have had their own entry around 1925; this was when James Van Der Zee began taking photographs of middle-class and ‘high society’ Harlem residents, and Aaron Douglas was making prints and paintings. Not only that, but Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, two of the ...”

“... and documented the Memphis demi-monde for his film Stranded in Canton. Jonas, who at this point had worked mostly in performance and made one short film, realised that the combination of camera, monitor and recorder would allow her to see results straight away in her studio. Already preoccupied by mirrors and mirroring – Borges was an influence – she ...”