Word: thackerays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...under his arm, a stout, bumbling, bemonocled young man called on Mr. Dickens to ask for the vacant job. The novelist took a quick look at the sketches and shook his head. "Had it not been for that unfortunate blight which came over my artistical existence," declared William Makepeace Thackeray many years later, "I should have tried to be not a writer, but a painter or designer of pictures...
...that time, Thackeray had never quite decided which to be. As a schoolboy, made miserable by a too massive head and painfully nearsighted eyes, he was "licked into indolence, abused into sulkiness, and bullied into despair." He took his revenge on his schoolmasters and schoolmates by drawing cruelly accurate caricatures of them in his schoolbooks. As a young dandy in Paris, he was happiest hobnobbing with Left Bank artists, Bohemians "and fellows of that sort." And these friends could often find him laboriously copying paintings in the Louvre in the hopes of becoming, like them, an artist...
...first-rate historical novel represents a strong and magical act of imagination: a great deal of learning may have gone into it, but the scaffolding has then been removed. Thackeray's Henry Esmond and Robert Graves's I, Claudius put the reader in the presence of the past; Proud Destiny puts before him only popularized history...
Predictable Punch conforms to a pattern that most Englishmen have come to consider as much a part of England as fish, chips and the Royal Family. As in the days when Tennyson, Thackeray, George du Maurier, Sir John Tenniel and A. A. Milne were steady contributors, Punch believes in social satire and good clean fun. It rarely gets any sexier than the recent cartoon of a harassed mother rabbit snapping at a big-eared little rabbit: "Well, if you must know, you came out of a hat." Punch has usually avoided divorce, profanity, violence and prone drunks, always relished outrageous...
Mixed & Murderous. The Woman in White takes three-quarters of the space given to the four mystery novels in this collection. It kept Thackeray reading all through one night although Collins used neither professional sleuth nor police to unravel his chilly horrors. "In our own over-specialized, disintegrated times," notes Editor Maurice Richardson, "there are the rigid categories of detective story, thriller, and ghost story, with several subdivisions to each . . , but in the last century they could all be lumped together as Tales of Mystery and Imagination." Along with The Woman in White in Editor Richardson's omnibus...