Search Results

“... little purpose. There is not much sign that Labour has learned the lesson. The new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is in some ways the worst possible choice. From what he has said so far it is evident that there will be the same dishonesty about crime, the same boneheaded attitude to drugs, the same belief that a Labour Party just re-elected with a majority of ...”

“... to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but are out of reach in person. Communication is one-way only. The old tribal codes of hospitality and chivalry have been ...”

“... Left Movement. He drove out into the hills with a taxi driver called Erasmos. They stopped at some gates, and he walked down on his own to a farm that had been taken over from an absentee landlord; the occupying students had turned it into a co-operative. Who are you? Hugh was asked, and what did he want. ‘To see the revolution,’ he replied. It is not hard ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... yell by comparison, though I concede this is a minority opinion.)My Life as a Man swung open the gates for one of the greatest thoroughbred runs in American letters, but even as Roth assumed full command of his powers, the controlled burn of his anger and vivacity, he would be sidelined and knocked flat by health problems that would have tried a saint, and ...”

“... carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at ...”

“... to symbolise vigilance and defence against the menace of spreading infection? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second biggest contributor, after the US government, to the WHO’s $2.4 billion budget. Gates is a believer in the tech fix. ‘I believe we are on the verge of taking historic steps to reduce disease ...”

“... Gentlemen were still marked off from Players as first-class cricket enjoyed golden years of huge gates and crowd-pleasing stroke play. There was nothing austere in the manner in which London’s favourite pro, Denis Compton, amassed runs in 1947, and by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and ...”

“... Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But look what a shit he is. We’ll open the gate wide, wide, and all become ...”

“... Museum, the Ashmolean) closed. Also all the colleges, and not just not open to visitors, but the gates actually locked. I ring the bell at Exeter but there is no answer so we hang about until an undergraduate goes in (entry now by Swipecard). An expressionless figure in the lodge, looking like a middle-ranking police inspector, says the college is closed. I ...”

“... seemed to consolidate. Not the extremist accounts of the damaged, beatific self in R.D. Laing and David Cooper, but a running tally of private hurt combined with an inventory of (equally private) need that thrived on a domestication of the visionary beliefs which gained currency in the 1960s. ‘Alienation’ was still being claimed as a negative human right ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political ...”

“... learned from her mistake. On her arrival at the State Department, she began courting General David Petraeus, the ‘architect of the successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq’ according to Allen and Parnes, whom she had offended in 2007 by questioning his rosy assessments of American military prospects. In early 2009, Petraeus was head of ...”

“... 1972 winner, John Berger, in denouncing capitalism and Booker’s treatment of Guyanese workers. David Lean optioned the novel a year later, and though the project came to nothing, Farrell found himself in funds for the first time in his life. After finishing The Singapore Grip in his two-room flat in South Kensington, he bought a cottage on the coast of ...”