Search Results

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... perverse that it sometimes seemed he was now simply missing the point of the original, as when he took the celebrated line ‘We must love one another or die’ to be a mistake, and preferred ‘We must love one another and die.’ Later he struck down the whole poem, as he did others, among them, it is still possible to argue, the finest of their ...”

“... an artist who constructed images out of words – in his painted inscriptions – and whose poems took in the observable world, including everything glimpsed in his peripheral vision. There was the hand-held and eye-level, frame-by-frame actuality of In Parenthesis (1937), his poem of the trenches, noise-saturated, full of chiaroscuro and stalked by ...”

“... My search is usually in vain. In my younger days when I used to go shopping a courteous grocer took my order without any of this search, and the goods I ordered were delivered the same afternoon. Now I have to pull my trolley laboriously homeward. Civilisation is certainly breaking down – indeed, has already done so. Cooking a solitary dinner is the ...”

“... for putting oneself to this task. Isherwood expressed this with typical simplicity in a letter to John Lehmann in July 1939: ‘I am so sick of being a person.’ The beginnings of his interest in Eastern religion were not easy, and this book starts out by conveying powerfully the Tennysonian quality of ‘honest doubt’ that Isherwood felt towards the whole ...”

“... considered in isolation. If you were to ask someone with an interest in such matters what they took to be the earliest surviving work of sculpture, the chances are that they would say the astonishing limestone ‘Venus’ discovered a century ago on the banks of the Danube not far from the Austrian village of Willendorf. Tiny yet massive, the figure’s ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”

“... guide to British curiosities, that the bones of giants had been discovered in Essex. The evidence took the form of limb bones the size of small tree trunks, and enormous teeth. The local people were familiar with legends of their oversized forebears, and the bones provided visible testimony to the history behind the legends. As in Essex, so in classical ...”

“... and had the wit to extend the hand of friendship to their enemies in the Union of 1910. The Boers took revenge in 1948 and we all know the unhappy story since then. Both sides are now bypassed for ever. One of the legacies of this emotionally charged colonial war, which has only recently slipped beyond living memory, was the phenomenon of the ‘Boer War ...”

“... or fill in a form or profit from reading a newspaper. He was a habitual scribbler, but it took him the greatest effort to believe in himself as a serious writer; and after his highbrow Bedales days he never even pretended to be a thinker. At most, when he took up the theory that Italian peasants, unlike the ...”

“... a time of suspicious locals but during the Troubles and their nationwide slaughters and blazes – took courage, and the book’s ending gives further evidence of this courage, in contrast with what there may be in her of the supine, accident-prone and excitable, a contrast which may supply the clearest instance of her duality. As a cradle Catholic still ...”

“... for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the ...”

“... Bertie Ahern’s evidence soon took a melancholy turn when he appeared before the Mahon Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments after resigning as Ireland’s taoiseach. ‘I was out working, out doing my job as a political leader of this country, working my butt off,’ he said. ‘Not trying to make other than my own income and the few sums of money that I got from others ...”

“... day, William Pitt. Though he was an instinctive Whig, Canning’s ambition and admiration for Pitt took him over to the Tory side, and eventually into rivalry with Castlereagh. A reader could easily get lost as Hunt delves into the tedious politics of the age with only a woeful index (as in ‘Castlereagh, passim’) and without so much as a chronology or ...”

“... to commit to a team by the age of six, or eight at the latest. Unlike my friends whose fathers took them to watch Aldershot’s Fourth Division tussles on Saturday afternoons, I don’t remember watching a football match before the 1986 Mexico World Cup, when I was already nine and a half. That term at school was dominated by the build-up to the ...”