Search Results

“... wombat is no longer common. Overgrazing and the destruction of their natural habitat has caused a sharp drop in their numbers; all species of wombat are now protected, and the northern hairy-nosed wombat is critically endangered. It has sleeker, softer fur than the common variety, and poor eyesight, relying on its large silky nose to guide it to food in the ...”

“... We have seen her at the edge of crowds, dwarfed against public buildings. We have seen her in woodcuts, a naked sabre in her hand, the tricolour cockade pinned to her cap; in drawings, with her wooden clogs and apron, her basket over her arm, her knitting in her hands: click, click, through the debates of the Assembly, in the gallery of the Jacobin Club, and each day at the foot of the scaffold, where the tumbrils bring up their freight of dying flesh ...”

“... self-identify as bohemian. All of this is presided over by Norah’s mother, the highly strung Katherine O’Dell, beloved Irish actress of stage and screen. Norah remembers her mother’s dress that evening as ill-fitting and embarrassing: ‘narrow bodice’, ‘fold-over white satin boat neck’, ‘lots of bare skin’. The party is full of ...”

“... cut some flaps of skin loose on the palm of my right hand while peeling my apple and pear with a sharp knife (yet often I used only a table knife) at breakfast. However, being extremely busy, as October and November advanced, with teaching, lecturing, and writing the introduction to my edition of the Sonnets, I didn’t devote much thought to any of ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ wasn’t sure what she felt when she heard that Katherine Mansfield was dead. The cook, ‘in her sensational way’, had broken the news to her at breakfast: ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day ...”

“... also of containing too much history.* In it Thomas Cromwell frees Henry VIII from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, engineers his union with Anne Boleyn by breaking from Rome, and has Thomas More executed. At the end of the book, in the late summer of 1535, Cromwell, the king and his attendants stop off at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, the home of the blandly ...”

“... feels like a detective trying to find out what has been going on. There is a dead woman called Katherine Feldmann about whom Lillian feels guilty. It seems that in London Lillian had become something of a literary ‘groupie’. She worked for a publisher who thought Katherine his most promising writer, but Lillian was ...”

“... about Mother: these subjects are all touched on, or are present, in his early work but without Katherine Bucknell to assist us, we would be hard pressed to locate them, let alone make out a case for their huge personal significance. Auden trained himself as a poet as he might have trained himself to be an engineer. Now and then he worried that he was not ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine Anne Porter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... 1530s, the consequences foreseen and unforeseen of Henry’s ‘Great Matter’ – the problem of Katherine of Aragon and the break with the Church of Rome – are all the more shocking because the bonds of social and political solidarity which pushed Cromwell up the ladder of preferment and promotion had once been so resilient. He had no grand plan for ...”

“... images of America are commentaries in which the fins of an automobile, the needle points of sharp-toed shoes, the armour-like seams of underwear and the tangled words of signage on street fronts build a picture rather as words do in paragraphs by writers he knew: Gaddis, say, or Nabokov or Perelman. Exaggerations – like the grotesque nose and chin ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, Sylvia Ashton-Warner in 1908 and Janet Frame in 1924 – three New Zealand women each of whom has achieved some measure of literary fame or reputation outside the country in which she was born. They have in common that they have worked uneasily in (and always breaking out of) the fictional mode ...”

“... Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb. And the paragraph after the one ...”

“... repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction to Women Writers at Work, a collection of Paris Review interviews 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 ...”

“... their labour power into higher wages, a better quality of life and a mountain of consumer goods? Katherine French provides a new angle on these questions by considering domestic life and material culture in London, as revealed by the abundant evidence in wills. Late medieval Londoners, she argues, had to ‘learn to live with more’. The increase of ...”