Search Results

“... The sea froze that winter. The shallow tidal run rippled over the shores and then froze to a solid sheet. Ice formed on the groynes and the metal struts of the pier. The bait diggers had to break through two inches of ice to dig for the buried lugworms. It was the coldest winter for decades, and the men on the lockpit had to work shifts to prevent the harbour gates freezing ...”

“... of strain, and the balance between observation and explanation remains uneasy. The Happiland of William Bedford’s first novel is a fairground in a fishing port on the North-Eastern coast, and it’s also the lost world of Harry Kelam’s youth, back in the Fifties. The novel is a period piece – one of Harry’s most significant experiences is the ...”

“... convoys of motor vehicles. ‘You never travelled with your suitcase,’ a grandson of the Duke of Bedford recalled – ‘that was not the thing to do.’ Guests at the duke’s seat, Woburn Abbey, were accordingly conveyed the fifty miles from London with the aid of four cars and eight staff to house parties where, as John Galsworthy wrote in 1931, time as ...”

“... Conrad Russell was a nephew of the ninth Duke of Bedford: every publisher in Great Russell Street and Bedford Square must have wanted to publish his selected letters, if only from simple loyalty to the landowner. Russell’s life was not remarkable, on the surface. Evelyn Waugh said he was ‘exquisitely entertaining’, but this is ambiguous: he may have meant that Russell was a figure of fun, like William Boot ...”

“... and most revealing – pieces was his long essay in the DNB on Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, a leading early Stuart politician, who died in 1641. Given the ‘eclectic’ character of Bedford’s religious preferences, which are best characterised as Calvinist Episcopalian, and the amphibious nature of his ...”

“... straight in the eye: ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet./Flowed up the hill and down King William Street’. This sampling outlines a familiar story about the modern city: it’s the place where the strength that was meant to come in numbers has been hollowed out or fractured. Carlyle saw London as ‘a huge aggregate of little systems, each of which ...”

“... that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”

“... before he died in 1922, John Butler Yeats wrote an angry, defensive letter to his eldest son William. W.B. Yeats had published a memoir in the Dial and his father objected to the almost parenthetical mention in one episode of an ‘enraged’ Yeats family. The remark unleashed in him a long-restrained irritation, prompting an impassioned defence of his ...”

“... and the beauty of music and art. In 1849, aged 22, she began attending the Ladies’ College in Bedford Square, the forerunner of Bedford College, founded by Elizabeth Reid, a family friend and fellow Unitarian.Bodichon adopted the same principles for the educational institutions she set up for both sexes. She took over ...”

“... art, advertising, commerce and philanthropy are intertwined.Branding Sunlight Soap was the idea of William Hesketh Lever. He entered his father’s wholesale grocery business at the age of 16. The firm Lever Brothers was founded in 1885 when he was in his early thirties and, with his brother, bought a small soap works in Warrington. In 1887 they moved to a ...”

“... to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in 1957 is ‘generally regarded as the finest single volume account of a criminal trial ever written’. The Notable British Trials series, published by William Hodge and ...”

“... during the Parliamentary session. It was the ideal place at which grandees like the Duke of Bedford, Lord Lansdowne and Lord Grey could meet the clever men of the rank and file, like the Edinburgh Reviewers Jeffrey and Horner, and later Mackintosh and Macaulay. If there was a common political creed in Whiggism, Holland House was the soil on which it ...”

“... again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father was a brazier. He was 13 when the Civil War broke out, and at 16 joined a regiment garrisoned at Newport Pagnell. During his army years Bunyan witnessed the struggle between Presbyterians, who wanted to reform the Church of ...”

“... assumptions about the role of rape in our culture. Both present America in a state of crisis. William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas are just the tip of the iceberg; the statistics are horrific. Rape is increasing four times faster than any other crime. Anywhere from 20 to 44 per cent of girls in their early teens can expect to suffer rape ...”

“... mastery of the sources, even to applaud. Hill has an at times overwhelming grip on the history of Bedford county, to the extent of being able to identify something of that loose but phenomenally successful ‘networking’ by which the English upper classes have long been able to get their way without being particularly obtrusive. He gives short histories of ...”