Word: hesketh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MERRY MONARCH: THE LIFE AND LIKENESS OF CHARLES II (274 pp.)-Hesketh Pearson-Harper...
Biographer Hesketh Pearson (Dizzy, Oscar Wilde) argues persuasively for the opposite view. The Charles he describes in a witty and partisan book was a tall, swarthy man who played a powerful game of tennis, made handsome settlements on his numerous bastards, encouraged science and literature, and left England a happier and more prosperous nation than he found it. Amid religious fanaticism, he remained tolerant and humane, and his chief fault was that he forgave anybody anything. He gained his political ends by letting himself be persuaded to do what he wished. "He had a sense of reality shared...
...whole, Biographer Ervine has written a solid, slow, yet readable account. It is duller, but more complete, than Hesketh Pearson's brilliant portrait (1950). And it firmly supports Shaw's claim to being the greatest dramatist in the English language since Shakespeare-a claim recently supported by his erratic fellow Irishman, Sean O'Casey. Wrote O'Casey in a memorable tribute: "Look at the Theatre as it was . . . So sob-sisterly, so stupid, so down to dust was the Theatre then that God turned his back to it, made for Shaw, caught him by the beard...
...WALTER SCOTT, HIS LIFE & PERSONALITY (295 pp.)-Hesketh Pearson-Harper...
...history's first mass reading public - a public that was created with the rise of the middle class, when literature ceased being mostly a fixture of the countryhouse and the coffeehouse, and was taken up by the new masters of the countinghouse. In his excellent new study, Biographer Hesketh Pearson (G.B.S., Dickens, Oscar Wilde) calls Scott "the first of the best-selling novelists." In his artful little life of the elder Dumas, Biog rapher André Maurois (Proust, Disraeli, Voltaire) says: "Better than any other novelist, Dumas knew how to share and satisfy the passions of the masses...