Search Results

“... they say women with bound feet had exceptionally strong thigh muscles.The brief periods young Eileen spent with her mother between her European trips are always warmly described in her essays. Yvonne would talk about England, France and the Swiss Alps, and Eileen was inspired to study at the University of London, become more famous than Lin ...”

“... opens with a British Council-sponsored cultural exchange, whereby an English sculptor, Stephen Cox, is sent to work with his Indian counterparts for three months. ‘Cultural exchanges are one of the more subtle ways of imposing cultural imperialism,’ writes Tully. ‘They create the impression that we respect Indian culture, while at the same ...”

“... up on pillows, gaze a bit vacantly at a marble the sculptor has been working on, in which two young dancers – bit players from a Bacchic sarcophagus – do the high-step with a bull. The animal is benevolent, not to say furry and fey; he holds up one foreleg daintily, so that the intersection of his cloven hoof with the sculptor’s nipple is entirely ...”

“... To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of adolescence, a free-floating poetic awareness, an otherness wholly and excitingly up-to-date ...”

“... In the old times, long before the birth of the Irish Free State, a young woman called Brigid McLaughlin went down from Derry to work in southern Donegal. Her job was to look after two children, a girl and a boy, aged nine and seven, orphans. ‘The children were beautiful,’ we are told, ‘especially the girl. She was dark, the boy was fair ...”

“... on his own boyhood memories as well as the facts of Lincoln’s life, Howells made the story of a young man’s rise from the frontier into a mythic tale. With the money he earned from the Lincoln biography, Howells travelled to Boston, then the literary capital of the United States, a trip that marked the beginning of his own mythic rise. Knowing no one in ...”

“... grinding effort and unceasing hard work, gloomy attributes which Cyril had never needed when young and hence remained disinclined for as he grew older. Though he joined in the chorus of contempt and hatred which it was fashionable for the middle-class English literati of the time to feel for their schooldays, the reality was another matter. He knew that ...”

“... Hampton in 1966, when Bloom was still married to Rod Steiger and Roth was dating ‘a beautiful young socialite’ by the beguiling name of Anne Mudge.)Here are the humble but allusive details that breathe life into anecdote: the emerald ring (in the shape of a serpent) with which Roth attempts to mollify Bloom for having cruelly depicted her in his novel ...”

“... sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel Snow has Lewis Eliot observe usefully: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping ...”

“... survive because, despite its merits, it ‘mimes transgression but never crosses the boundary’. Stephen Haggard’s Nya is the story of the love between a young man and a 13-year-old girl. Readers of Lolita will imagine such a book as a hotbed of sexual and linguistic transgression. But in Nya nothing untoward ...”

“... sprang from a nursery anarchy which is at least as well understood by today’s style-hungry young as the tribal uses of African masks were in Fitzroy and Gordon Squares, while the Omega pieces themselves begin to merge with others which derived motives from Cubism and early abstraction. Omega becomes a kind of rustic Art Deco, and, as time passes, an ...”

“... it was perfectly all right for Wednesbury Corporation to use its cinema licensing powers to stop young people going to the pictures on Sundays? Not one of these decisions, each of them affecting what we would recognise now as fundamental human rights, is intelligible today except by situating the reasoning of the deciding court in its peculiar time and ...”

“... his contemporary advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of an eye and a leg in battle on how to retain his mistress’s affection. John Debrett’s flagship was the Peerage, which rode the generations ...”

“... society: but more important, she has somehow got inside her Italian characters, so that when a young Englishwoman appears on the scene she really seems a foreigner and not, as one might expect, the focus of the novel’s consciousness. Imagination is part of the mystery; the other part is pace. This novel seems to impose its own slow pace on the ...”