Search Results

“... imaginary Oxford don. As the letters make clear, he was troubled by the forms of ease his unease took. His detachment always puzzled him. He felt it to be at once a necessity and a self-estranging technique. Being able to be more English than the English while being self-evidently a foreigner put him at an odd angle to himself. When he married Aline Halban ...”

“... reputation is based on a famous trilogy of novels in English, was also worried that writers who took up the colonial language were guilty of a ‘dreadful betrayal’: he was thinking of Leavis’s view, which Ngugi shares, that language is not simply ‘an analogue for a culture’ but its ‘essential life’. Achebe’s approach was to say that the ...”

“... was a thoughtful, inventive television documentary, Becoming Cary Grant, made by Mark Kidel, which took advantage of the archive of home movies shot by Grant over the years, and gave clear proof that he looked at pretty women with the mood of an avid hunter. Mark Glancy was the official consultant on the documentary, having already put in several years’ work ...”

“... Her topic makes most sense when the details of diplomacy are placed in a wider context.In 1836, John Stuart Mill claimed in an essay that Lord Melbourne’s government had become ‘smitten with the epidemic disease of Russophobia’, an irrational panic that had triggered an unnecessary increase in defence spending. ‘Russophobia’ has never quite left ...”

“... represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family gathered they talked about the Fenians and evictions, Black and Tan ...”

“... I noted with borrowed eloquence; a terrible blandness has taken over.The road out of Belfast took us through neat suburbs fringed with lawns and gardens. The man with the mortgage, we decided, is rarely the man with the mortar. Belfast calls itself the City of the Titanic, as indeed it was, but it has clearly broken out of the dying North Atlantic ...”

“... a marital scandal in provincial musical circles. She was unamused and offended by his levity: she took his bohemian tolerance of such things as sign of ‘a deplorable looseness in my own character’. He abandoned the subject and, the following day, the diary. Clearly he could not keep it truthfully without some betrayal of his wife. He had not the first ...”

“... Then he can be given a mythical personality: “He spent his time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border.” ’ Though the artist may appear to engage with the quotidian and the circumstantial, these involvements are only false fronts masking a supreme detachment; the true writer ‘never participates in anything; his pretences ...”

“... and superstitious, and at the Buddhist monks who robbed and killed travellers and, moreover, took wives to themselves. The Chinese, he maintained, had ‘no conception of the rules of logic’, and he composed a series of dialogues between a Catholic priest and an indigenous scholar, designed to demonstrate the balance of logic and faith lying at the ...”

“... is that his troubles were not more immediately fatal; what saved him, I suppose, is that no one took him seriously. The little we know about Urquhart’s early life comes mostly from his own pen, and is therefore not likely to be true. But there is one incident, vouched for in the records, that seems somehow emblematic. In 1636, after his father had ...”

“... were not alone in esteeming the New Christians: it is even possible that Spanish aristocrats took seriously converso claims that the Jewish élite constituted a true nobility. Though polemicists might inveigh against the smell of the Jew and the converso (attributable partly to bad breath after eating food fried in oil rather than lard or butter), the ...”

“... remitted to them.’ Mandrin further embellished his legend by freeing prisoners in the towns he took over – but only the smugglers, counterfeiters and army deserters, not the common thieves. It is no wonder that he is often called the French Robin Hood. Mandrin’s story, however, did not end like Robin Hood’s. The France of Louis XV, despite its ...”

“... a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.’ Chandler, in his letters, took a similarly hardboiled stance towards ‘the fancy boys’, as he called the writers whom critics – all of them sterile phonies – said they liked. They could be divided, he wrote in 1957, into ‘the subtle-subtle ones … the stream-of-consciousness ...”

“... of many carefully held handshakes. That, as Margaret MacMillan confirms, is more or less what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last ...”

“... the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos, which took shape in the last days of the Second World War, was in some sense a negation of both Fascism and Futurism. It was born in opposition to Fascist propaganda, both aesthetic and political; it embodied a resistance akin to that of Italy’s anti-Fascist ...”