Search Results

“... Sir Clough Williams-Ellis is best known nowadays as the owner-architect of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner ...”

“... cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow’s inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also have a dialectical point to make. British critics ...”

“... without it. Some thought it was the hallmark of genius, a view obstinately perpetuated by Havelock Ellis. In short, it was an honour to have gout and the phrase ‘the honour of the gout’ was in free use. The authors quote Earl Nugent’s apology to the Duke of Newcastle for failing to wait on him: ‘He received the Honor of His Grace’s card here, where ...”

“... good, he found, for grandiose magic lantern effects. Presumably it was decided early on by Jane Stevenson or Cape (perhaps both) that, given the wealth of filmed interviews, surviving correspondence with racy friends and the ever interesting state of his health tested by remarkably extensive travels, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye could be ...”

“... and the couple spend a holiday in California, visiting Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his wife, Jane, wealthy idealists seeking to set up a utopian community. The dialogue here strikes a number of false notes, with ‘trial’ used as a verb (a piece of organisational jargon not cited by the OED before 1981) and an experience described as something that ...”

“... Sir Patrick Geddes and J.A. Thomason’s popular volume, The Evolution of Sex, and Havelock Ellis’s massive Studies in the Psychology of Sex, as well as a host of more technical studies and the amateur anthropology of the Men and Women’s Club all brought sex under the sign of ‘science’. Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds presented ...”

“... men and their modes, even to the extent of calling themselves George Eliot, or Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell. (Odd that the imitators should be inimitable.) No applause for authors laying claim to a tradition, and working within it: just a demand that gender should proclaim itself all over the prose. (Try applying this argument to writing by men, and ...”

“... people to read novels as realistic narratives which must have drawn on their authors’ lives; Jane Eyre, subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, is one example, David Copperfield another. The Brontës tried to conceal their identities behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and the consequences ...”

“... latter book stands in for the drastic elision of the human subject in the former. The fact that Jane Austen could create Emma Woodhouse as well as Fanny Price tells us something about Mansfield Park’s view of its own heroine. If we did not know that industrial imagery in William Blake’s work generally carries a negative charge, it would be harder to ...”

“... sexuality: sadism, masochism, fetishism, ‘antipathetic sexual instinct’) and Havelock Ellis, whose study Sexual Inversion was published in 1897 and banned in England after the Wilde trial. Unable to decide whether they should blame McCormick or his cool, mannish wife, his doctors confidently advise a variety of vastly expensive, increasingly ...”

“... of travel and adventure. It is the story of a young English couple, Felix Thurstan and Miss Muriel Ellis, washed overboard from a steamer in the South Seas and cast up on an island called Boupari, where the religious habits of the natives are a close replica of those described by Frazer. There are some ludicrous moments in the tale: Felix (by now desperately ...”

“... his wake – John Hawkes, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Renata Adler, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin come to mind – but innovative narrative fiction has enjoyed far greater support from publishers and readers in Europe. The bulk of published American fiction consists of cookie-cutter, middle-class ‘problem novels’ by tenured academics and ...”

“... middle classes, as well as the poor, by 1800. There is no way around the fact that the novels of Jane Austen were free from the coarse sexual innuendoes of Aphra Behn, Defoe, Fielding or Smollett, while Dickens ignored the subject of sex altogether. Michael Mason’s main problem is to determine how prudery affected behaviour. Was it merely a veneer of ...”

“... There were other tricks: expats and émigrés – notably Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap at the Little Review and George Plimpton at the Paris Review – were sometimes able to take advantage of favourable exchange rates. Some publishers financed themselves by playing the art market; the Surrealists funded many of their activities in this ...”

“... 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and the track ...”