Search Results

“... might be a mistake. Just as 12 years for Ken would be too much, Boris is surely unthinkable in a major public office with real executive power. The alternative would be for all progressive voters to switch their first-preference vote to the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. In mayoral elections to date the Lib Dems have done by far the best among ...”

“... Other Shore’, and this is the stage on which his two protagonists, David Livingstone and John Kirk, play out their very different and not always complementary roles in the abolition of slavery. Liebowitz, a professor emeritus of medicine, writes with the enthusiasm of an accomplished academic who has found a new field of research after a career spent ...”

“... empire became even more influential on Elizabethan strategic thinking. According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most ...”

“... First, it falls silent on 9 October 1956. Thus it excludes many – indeed most – of the major and traumatic events of the Gaitskell Leadership: the uneasy partnership with Aneurin Bevan as Deputy Leader; the 1959 General Election defeat and the subsequent struggle over the philosophy of the party; the Clause Four row of 1959-60; the first flowering ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it extraordinary distinction. In the period ...”

“... Garlake remarks, ‘designed less to inspire than to avoid giving offence’. Despite this, the major exhibitions which the Arts Council mounted at the Tate Gallery during the immediate postwar years greatly enlivened its near-moribund exhibition programme and aided London’s gradual takeover from Paris as a centre for the international art ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th ...”

“... are no sodomites in Greene’s account, and the only coward, crank and sap-headed dilettante is John Sterling, the would-be mastermind of the whole affair. Charismatic, feckless and volatile, Sterling had dropped out of Cambridge, and by 1827, when he was 21, drifted to London, where he was dabbling in journalism and trying to sort out his doubts about ...”

“... was at once a key document of the so-called ‘sociobiological revolution’ of the Seventies, a major student text, and a successful popular book. The Extended Phenotype (1981) was in some respects harder-going, but still it combined novel evolutionary ideas with accessibility to a general readership. Now we have The Blind Watchmaker. This, Dawkins’s best ...”

“... For they all express a rejection of the Western model of economic development propagated by the major aid agencies and financial institutions. These new movements harbour the suspicion that development on the Western model often creates poverty where it did not exist before, and produces patterns of economic activity in which the independence and integrity ...”

“... own Hutchinson, Cape, Chatto and Windus, Bodley Head. Below this league, which numbers about ten major players, there have been some marriages of convenience. Weidenfeld holdings, for instance, include the brash Weidenfeld and Nicolson and the staid J.M. Dent and Everyman imprints. There have also been some bloody dismemberings. Methuen (which celebrates its ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... in the last decades of the 18th century, before Wilson came to be forgotten. The portrait painter John Hoppner, an early adherent of the Joey-Barton-on-Question-Time school of cultural criticism, declared that ‘considering the qualities of Claude & Wilson as He shd. the qualities of two fine Women, He should acknowledge the beauties of Claude but say Wilson ...”