Search Results

“... war plan for Korea (‘Operations Plan 5030’). The strategy, according to insiders who have read the plan, is ‘to topple Kim’s regime by destabilising its military forces’, who would then overthrow him and bring about a ‘regime change’. The plan was pushed, according to an article in US News and World Report, ‘by many of the same ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... was to go to America to work with George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. In a letter to Richard Buckle, Lincoln Kirstein described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the ...”

“... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ...”

“... for teenagers. Trump’s description of the novel reveals no evidence that he has actually read it, but his identification with Roark is consistent with Rand’s exaltation of egoism.Trump’s self-promotional grandiosity has prompted endless comparisons to P.T. Barnum, the showman and circus operator of the 19th century who was the son of a ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... or to this particular one, or the absence of virtue tout court, supposed to take? It’s enough to read poetry from time to time to reckon the material character of language, and to know that meaning is fugitive; a reader with a politicised sense of the page might even agree that it is the business of poetry to insist on the migratory character of meaning. Yet ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”

“... they are sung by a pure blooded Negro.’ Naturally I had to borrow the book that very minute, read it on the yellow Pacific Electric streetcar that day and second time that night, then begin telling everybody I knew about it.  The responses of black friends were surprising. Nearly all of them stopped to listen. There was no doubt that their blood came ...”

“... anyone yearning for yet more of his cracker-barrel views on political and economic matters could read his spirited attempts to convert Senator Bronson Cutting, Congressman George Tinkham and Senator William E. Borah to Poundian solutions to American policy issues: these were collected in volumes published in 1995, 1996 and 2001 respectively. His epistolary ...”

“... The Whig Interpretation of History, one of those ‘classics’ which is now more referred to than read. Its title, together with the generalised sense of ‘Whig history’, may have entered the language, but beyond having a vague awareness that Whiggish history is, in the terms used by another historical classic of the same vintage, a Bad Thing, many of us ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”