Search Results

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... Hart Davis’s history of the Daily Telegraph under the Berry family, and of the second volume of Michael Wharton’s autobiography. Hart-Davis was a fairly junior member of the Telegraph’s staff for some years. As the author of the ‘Peter Simple’ column for thirty-odd years, Wharton must be regarded as ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely ...”

“... these scenes a mocking voice-over – the voice is Joanne Woodward’s – reads some of Edith Wharton’s funniest lines (‘Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it’), which complicate and perturb the meaning of these already complicated and perturbing images. Nothing, it seems, is to escape the irony of ...”

“... would fail and be rebranded with the name of a more popular writer: ‘best of all as the Edith Wharton!’ In 1902, when he made this prediction, James was hardly lacking in fame. And in the two years that followed he published The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. After his death in 1916 his reputation rose steadily, buoyed by ...”

“... what concentration, effort, agony he must have laboured on these marvellous poems!’ Michael Wharton exclaimed in a review in the Spectator, praise which was prominently reprinted on the jacket of the 1985 Collected Poems to sum up a whole school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in ...”

“... married couple – ‘Hampstead’ progressives – to a pagan-Catholic frame of mind, while Edith Wharton’s house, Bells, nearest post-office Thudeney-Blazes, tries the strength of the sensible grand lady who inherits it. ‘ “Fudge!” muttered Lady Jane,’ who is ‘interested in old houses’ and in travel, like ...”

“... liked them very much, but still didn’t know why Wilson had been fired by the New Republic. Michael Straight was his sister’s husband – can that be right? the chains of relation are sometimes bewildering in Vidal’s world, where literally everybody seems to know everybody – but when Vidal had asked him, Straight simply said: ‘Well, he ...”

“... the facts of ‘what really passed between them’ is doomed to failure in advance. Neither Michael Bloch’s cautious scholarship nor Osbert Sitwell’s posthumous malice will erode posterity’s obstinate penchant for romantic love. Having said that, it has to be admitted that both the volumes under review are full of historical insights of the most ...”

“... a useful potted chronology of English translations of Sappho, up to and including Dr Henry Wharton’s highly influential Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (1885). The much-translated (and notoriously strange) Fragment 31 – quoted below in Anne Carson’s closely literal modern version – comes in for particular ...”

“... moving ‘in a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and precautions’. She disliked Edith Wharton ‘thoroughly – and morbidly’, as Edel put it, and this meant that Wharton or anyone else deemed disreputable could not be involved in any aspect of the estate. Miss Bosanquet, James’s highly intelligent final ...”

“... heroes of the time had mostly been in active service in colonial wars, notably in Palestine. Harry Wharton, Anthony Cavendish, Maurice Oldfield, the arch-racialist George Kennedy Young – all these were in MI5 or MI6 either during or after the war. All of them shared the deeply reactionary ideas which had traditionally inspired the secret service. This, of ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith ...”

“... entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan Meades claims it’s ‘Closing Time for ...”

“... Larkin who comes out of it as the better performer. Like other figures on the right, Paul Johnson, Michael Wharton and the Spectator crowd, Larkin regarded television as the work of the devil, or at any rate the Labour Party, and was as reluctant to be pictured as any primitive tribesman. Silly, I suppose I think this is, and also self-regarding. Hughes ...”