Search Results

“... of her family might make for an ideal TV series, recounting as it does a comforting upper-class idyll complete with loyal attendants, marred only by revolution, exile and controversy and concluding with a triumphant return home to prosperity. An honest recounting of the story would have to feature among its climactic episodes the chequered career of ...”

“... from his convention speech and life story, Obama is best known for his early opposition to the war in Iraq. For this most cautious of politicians, his position on the war was a calculated risk, but a sound one. In the autumn of 2002, around the time Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards voted to give Bush the ...”

“... In pre-Civil War​ fugitive slave narratives – memoirs written by men and, occasionally, women who had escaped to freedom and hoped to convert readers to the cause of abolition – the most heart-rending passages described slave auctions and the separation of families that usually ensued. When the abolitionist journalist and underground railroad activist Sydney Howard Gay interviewed fugitives who passed through his office in New York City in the 1850s he found that the threat of sale was a major reason for the decision to run away ...”

“... I was there to make good something in his life. When he’d been my age, in East Germany, with the war just ending and the Russians in occupation, he had dropped out of school, and even spent a couple of months in proper prison, with real murderers. He was trying to ensure that nothing of the kind happened to me. A while later, I came upon the term ...”

“... L.L. Bean outdoor gear displayed in the fashion pages of GQ and Esquire. These days the Vietnam War has been reduced to a Generation X rock band named Diem. Recently, I overheard a young, pepper-bellied Mexican saloon-owner by the name of Dagoberto telling a Vietnam veteran in his overpriced Aspen bar: ‘You old farts, still mucking around in that ...”

“... in London (where their preponderance was supposedly due to the lack of eligible men post-war) Noël’s female acquaintance in Manhattan encompassed an inordinate number of lesbians – an entire social network of their own.’ And the men? The types to which he was attracted were ‘masculine, assertive, athletic and elegant’, preferably in ...”

“... ruled in his place and was known officially as Sir Max Aitken, unofficially, after his gallant war, as Biggles. He was widely liked, even loved; but though a civilised and kindly boss, he lacked the zest and edge of an ordinarily successful newspaper-owner, never mind the special, bottomless fund of vitality with which his father boiled. Best remembered ...”

“... in English by men born in Warsaw and Vienna. Czerniawski and Lind came here in the first post-war decade, and are – to me oddly and blithely – unconcerned about questions of entry, residence and nationality. (Lind marries an English girl who seems hotter than he is on the matter of aliens gaining work permits; Czerniawski drily describes the efforts ...”

“... recognised masterpieces, and a number of the essays, particularly those about the Spanish-American War, retain their power today. Norris’s life, on the other hand, was distinguished only by its privilege. He was the child of a prominent San Francisco family, whose every holiday was reported in the society pages. He attended a series of elite schools, and ...”

“... Neubauer’s comment on their results: ‘In a country which ... after the end of the Second World War bases its moral self-understanding upon the myth of the Resistance, completely different myths suddenly spring up and transform what is “real”. This result alone is worth the cost of the research.’ How so? It is not news that for a long time the French ...”

“... and best organised Islamist party is the Jamaat-Islami. It has joined in the protests against the war to avoid being outflanked by the radicals, but there are clear signs that its leaders are worried about climbing on the Taliban tiger. They may be rigidly puritanical in their ideology, but they are the kind of rigid puritans who in British and American ...”

“... days, in America especially, it is often seen as somehow derogatory, having a whiff of ‘third class’ about it and therefore best avoided for fear of upsetting visitors from less fortunate nations. Those who pioneered the expression, such as Frantz Fanon, would no doubt have become even more attached to the principle of violence if they had known how ...”

“... Mumbai. For some months polls in the US have shown that the economic crisis has replaced the Iraqi war in the minds of American voters. In any case, Bush has declared so many spurious milestones to have been passed in Iraq over the years that when a real turning point is reached people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House is anyway ...”

“... years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political disorder; four years of war against the media, ‘globalists’, ‘elites’ and other ‘enemies of the people’, which is to say his people, or rather his loyalists; four years of contempt for the vulnerable, whether Muslims, undocumented immigrants, Black victims of police ...”

“... The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s stoking of rebellion in Donbas, which he describes in the preface to The Soviet Century as the ‘drop that made my cup run over ...”