Search Results

“... and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul LawrenceRose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as ...”

“... When Willie Hopkin first caught sight of D.H. Lawrence in his pram, he thought him a ‘puny, fragile little specimen’. Forty-four years later the fragile specimen died, reduced by tuberculosis to a weight of 90 pounds. It is understandable, then, that Jeffrey Meyers should make much of Lawrence’s ‘lifelong invalidism’, and conclude his biography with an appendix called ‘A History of Illness ...”

“... I admit​ that the advert announcing this authoritative critical edition of D.H. Lawrence’s poems made me snort. The painstaking collation of every textual variant seems an odd aim in the case of a writer like Lawrence, who wrote of ‘mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, not rest, come-and-go, not fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy ...”

“... for the first time, as a volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D.H. Lawrence.* It is an unfinished novel of 292 pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up ...”

“... of the hero’s finger. A historical novel set in pre-Revolutionary France, it shares with Lawrence Norfolk’s recent Lemprière’s Dictionary the knowledge of some hitherto unsuspected developments in 18th-century robotics. In Paul Micou’s Rotten Times the main character suffers from a hyperactive access of ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... facts which hitherto it has been the fashion to ignore ... How often have I been vituperated by rose-water critics because I have written of fighting and tried to inculcate elementary lessons, such as that it is a man’s duty to defend his country, and that only those who are prepared for war can protect themselves and such as are dear to ...”

“... This time the victim was a Christian missionary called Benjamin Weir. In January 1985, Father Lawrence Jenco was captured, to be followed three months later by Terry Anderson. Where was Ollie North all this time? In 1981, he was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to the White House. This was, North is too ...”

“... it as ‘a silly book, founded on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis’, while Lawrence Stone thought it advanced ‘an implausible hypothesis based on a far-fetched connection with one still uproven fact of limited general significance’. On the other hand, Paul Hyams hailed it as a blast of fresh air ...”

“... colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end. Paul Theroux’s last novel, My Secret History, deployed a cool transparency of style to great effect in telling a story which appeared to be flagrantly autobiographical: that’s to say, its central character, ‘Andre Parent’, had lived in the same places and ...”

“... involved with the area. When George Bernard Shaw, who lived in the nearby village of Ayot St Lawrence, needed a garage, he asked Parker (his revolving writing hut was Shaw’s own work).Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead followed Letchworth and Welwyn in the first wave of postwar new towns. Few realise that Hatfield was another, a town extension planned and ...”

“... and the raising from the mud of the Thames, later that year, of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose. A common significance could be attached to both events: an ancient seafaring people, Churchill’s island race, were recovering some long-buried aspect of their identity. Wright is a brilliant analyst of cultural meanings and has uncovered, with much ...”

“... from Wimbledon for designing too-saucy dresses for tennis women (Teddy Tinling); a third, who rose from private in the Honourable Artillery Company, was a devout Christian who launched the Hammer House of Horror (Sir James Carreras). All demonstrated that a spell in uniform, as the sovereign’s trusty and well-beloved, never cramped a creative ...”

“... and tried to get John Dee to put him in touch with the heavenly orders. True, there had been Pope Paul III, a politician if ever there was one and founder of the Counter-Reformation: he retained an astrologer to tell him, I suppose, when it was prudent to launch the Society of Jesus or set up the Roman Inquisition (which was to persecute astrologers). Since ...”

“... with her own self, or non-self, as a male dream preserve, the woman’s refuge might be, as St Paul said, in silence. And, ironically, it is the most ‘sensitive’ males who could be, in this context, the most exasperating. Feminism is surely right to be particularly resentful of male attempts to create, in however full a degree of sympathy, the ...”