Search Results

“... regular invitations from the community of particle physicists who admire my films as much as rock musicians, skateboarders and various other enthusiastic denominations do.’ Herzog likes to insist that a director should be more of an athlete than an aesthete and, perhaps as a result, the memoir devotes a great deal of attention to the human body in ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... rate rise was a consequence of the decision to exchange the relatively worthless Ostmark for the rock solid Deutschmark at the deeply patriotic rate of 1:1, thereby absorbing the former and temporarily weakening the latter. So Thatcher was right – German reunification did spell big trouble for the UK – but for the wrong reasons. She didn’t foresee the ...”

“... and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies. Jack Yeats’s judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges that would be repeated, with diminishing persuasiveness, for the next twenty ...”

“... In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain ...”

“... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...”

“... their dependence on a day-return metropolis. Aylesbury, with its vegetable gardens (its pensioned rock stars), requires a market for its produce. Binding’s fictional family, the Bembos, are implicated in this trade. They travel to Covent Garden. They are parley-speakers from good mountebank stock, not Romanies. The ‘real’ Aylesbury is known for its ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... of his body. ‘I had never before,’ says Barney, ‘seen an adult male standing on agrillaceous rock and rolling his balls minutely around the outstretched palm of his hand.’ Howard Jacobson doesn’t yet know what to do with characters like these. When he does, he’ll be a novelist to reckon with. Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge sells his ...”

“... them. I was starting to like my Jimi Hendrix album after all: my unwitting mentors were steeped in rock and roll, folk revival, blues by white and black musicians, and jazz. One had a compilation album, Electronic Music, with work by Berio and Cage, and the Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroğlu. All this fell under the perplexing heading ‘progressive ...”

“... for crimes they did not commit. Thames TV’s crime was to broadcast the programme Death on the Rock, which questioned the shooting of unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar. The programme, which won an award, was exculpated and praised by an independent inquiry after a terrific huffing and puffing of outrage in which B. Ingham played his usual part. ‘My ...”

“... of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it is the Labour Party, and specifically its left wing, which suffers most severely from myths about a golden past now lost in the mists of time. Even quite well-read Labour politicians are prone to the belief that This Great Movement of ...”

“... Fleet Street, having no interest whatever in ‘last year’s story’ lest that interest might rock the boat. Were the future to reveal similar weaknesses in a Labour Administration Dalyell would doubtless nail them in the same forthright fashion. Critics on his own side may sometimes see him as a ‘bloody pest’, but in reality his self-chosen ...”

“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”