Search Results

“... through The Biographer’s Tale (2000), a book which seems to take place entirely in a filing cabinet (don’t worry, there are also sadistic pictures). If you told me she had a lost novel about paperweights, I would believe you. And I would read that too.Byatt died last November, at the age of 87. That is a mellow span and a proper hour. I am not sure if ...”

“... by investing them with torrid symbolic values. The severity of those negotiations could in turn shadow the prospect for co-operation on other matters. History, being sloppy, will probably not allow anything nearly so neat as a three-bloc world. But the centrifugal forces identified by Dornbusch and others could certainly produce a more fragmented and less ...”

“... a virtual coup ratified by a Parliament whose nerve had snapped, France dominated by the shadow of le Général as it had been before by that of le Maréchal. The part of the young de Gaulle was played by François Mitterrand, who denounced de Gaulle’s coup at the outset. As a young résistant, Mitterrand had once looked up to de Gaulle much as de ...”

“... and civil service of the Federal Republic had served the Nazis, as had some politicians of sub-cabinet and even cabinet rank.) And, he suggests, Germany might have been different had its leaders been able, for example, to honour rather than ignore or despise the memory of the 1944 Stauffenberg plot, in which aristocratic ...”

“... possible successor – while Manuel got the more solid promotion to ANC finance spokesman, i.e. shadow finance minister. Yengeni got nothing – a rare case of one of the SACP vanguard being forced out to the benefit of a non-Communist. Yengeni’s resentment grew as it became increasingly clear that Boesak’s ‘election’ had been a flop – for the ...”

“... Instead, there will be a period of power-sharing in which the ANC will sit in a cabinet alongside the party responsible for apartheid. More broadly, it is inconceivable that any government, no matter what its political stripe, will be able to run South Africa without sharing power with white civil servants, policemen, generals and ...”

“... way out. O’ Hanlon, on the other hand, is confidently betting everything on Jean Ngatsiebe, the Cabinet Secretary to the Ministry for Scientific Research, with whom they have an appointment; and on Marcellin Agnagna – the author of the dinosaur-appendix – who is to come with them on their journey, once he has written up his latest elephant ...”

“... well take a different stance. Conservative ministers still want a sale and Liam Byrne, Labour’s shadow minister for universities, indicated at last year’s party conference that he had been ‘pressing’ Cable to crack on, even while admitting that it might turn out Cable had made the right call. When Labour last took a line in public, in 2013, its ...”

“... death: the pro-German government had been forced to step down the day after his capture and no cabinet was sworn in until the day of the execution, which we now know was on 10 June (five days after the date he was said to have died when E.P. delivered his Stanford lectures). ‘With whom was this supposed British deal entailing Frank’s murder to be ...”

“... Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists in bleus de ...”

“... or poverty or unemployment. Even by the standard of unworldly poets, he is like one of those cabinet ministers who doesn’t know the price of milk. To some extent, this is a misapprehension. An early book of his, the so-called Book of Hours, has sections ‘On Monastic Life’, ‘On Pilgrimage’ and ‘On Poverty and Death’. A slightly hallowed ...”

“... take office under Collor, its leadership divided. Cardoso was among those who favoured joining his cabinet. A month later, the scandal of Presidential corruption – already bubbling – boiled over. Once Congress had formally set up an enquiry, Collor became a political untouchable. This was a narrow escape for Cardoso. Had the investigation not started so ...”

“... this is largely explained by the shortcomings and temporisings of the statesmen mentioned, the shadow of Watergate is to be discerned here: Kissinger noted how, as the scandal developed, Brandt became a shade less ‘respectful’ in his dealings with the Americans.) Kissinger, of course, prides himself on his skill as a diplomat (‘this is a trick I have ...”

“... it was both event and quotation. This, against the incontinent stacking of trophies in that great cabinet of curiosities, the British Museum, is a coherent pitch. The building is not separated from the city, it’s not a respite, a dream with too many chambers, collisions, compartments; it tells one story, the rock. The temple and its vanished gods. On each ...”

“... They live in the heat because they have destroyed their forest. Here, under the big trees, is cool shadow. We don’t want to change places with them.For a nomad, home is not a mark on a map, but an environment; and the environment of the Penan was being destroyed. The island of Borneo is divided between the countries of Indonesia, Malaysia and ...”