Search Results

“... correspondence between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She ...”

“... Heights has left its mark indirectly on this novel. Crusoe’s Daughter, with its heroine Polly Flint metaphorically cast away, and not cast down by it, is rather more open about its literary appropriations. Polly Flint, though, is a good deal more than Crusoe’s parrot. Crusoe, for her, is both a solace and an ...”

“... share to the ranks of those who have achieved some form of cultural or intellectual distinction. Polly Toynbee, well known as a journalist and columnist for the Observer, the BBC and the Guardian, is a representative of one such clan, and in An Uneasy Inheritance she melds entertaining accounts of her most notable recent ancestors into ‘a particular ...”

“... as Macheath. He didn’t move against the play, but by banning its relatively innocent sequel Polly before it reached the stage he effectively ended Gay’s theatrical career. David Nokes, who is uniquely learned in all that concerns Gay and enormously well-informed about the entire literary-political scene, has understandably felt a duty to describe in ...”

“... or even that of peasant pioneer, like the early cocoa farmers of the Gold Coast studied by Polly Hill who were more or less compelled to supplement the labour of their families with wage-workers from neighbouring regions who were then paid by the load. The role may be favoured by the prior existence of a highly stratified social structure which ...”

“... 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not ...”

“... sectarianism: this is one of the points underlined in the collection of essays Across a Roaring Hill (subtitled ‘The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland’), which Edna Longley co-edited in 1985. Some of the contributors to this book sought to distinguish between the imaginations of certain Protestant writers, and a Protestant, or Catholic, cast of ...”

“... learn that the Dandridge County Courthouse has the marriage bond of Davy Crockett and Polly Finley and the record of an earlier licence, "returned unused", issued to Crockett and Miss Margaret Elder.’ The recourse to ‘association’ answered another old anxiety about the American social and physical landscape: that, as Washington Irving ...”

“... It is a time of innocence. Nick Guest has just graduated from Oxford, and is living in Notting Hill with the Feddens: Gerald and Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. He is about to start a PhD on Henry James’s style at UCL. Toby Fedden was a contemporary of Nick’s at university: they weren’t exactly friends, but Nick had a crush on ...”

“... colleagues were devastated, his enemies rejoiced. Two days later the Guardian published a piece by Polly Toynbee denouncing Waugh as one of the ‘reactionary fogeys’ whose icon was Evelyn Waugh. ‘Effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist’, he was a writer of ‘limited vocabulary’ whose work was ‘empty and destructive’. Eighteen years ...”

“... his father was another of them. The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss ...”

“... peace; unfinished at his death in 2017, it has been seamlessly completed by his widow, Rosemary Hill. In Interwar, Stamp is scrupulously equitable and veers towards a sort of stylistic indifferentism: everything engages him, even junk neo-Georgian buildings that are beyond meretricious. He celebrates variety, eccentricity and figures from oblivion who have ...”

“... of it than some earlier cultures. The introduction of a female-centred pornography with Fanny Hill, the new ‘sex and sensibility’ standards of 18th-century marriage, the decrease in the age of marriage and first intercourse (plus, according to one reading of the demographic evidence, more of the latter performed without matrimonial intentions) over a ...”

“... of his flesh to catch a shark, ‘which proved a great relief to them’. Aboard the crippled brig Polly parts of a victim were found pickled against emergency. Faced with these and other examples of involuntary cannibalism, the reader needs to ask himself whether, if lying in hospital awaiting an organ transplant, he would turn away the liver hacked from a ...”

“... Leopold Bloom might muse. We hear the biff biff of two helicopters above the council estate on the hill. Then he describes a recent shoot-out: helicopters and SAS men waiting at the bridge, shooting, a wounded IRA man hiding in the roofspace of a row of council houses and moving from one to the other as the houses are searched again and again. The estate is ...”