Search Results

“... a specialism in the new psychology. Now it has been extended still further. Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and a host of more or less meretricious popularisers have quite literally brought it home. Sexuality has passed from the bench to the couch to our very own bedsides. But the domestication of this series of pseudo-sciences is not the liberation of ...”

“... the landscape is not as bleak as he suggests. Paulin finds room for two such poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, though I might not have echoed his choice from the latter: the 82 uses of ‘fucking’ in 50 lines would perhaps be more effective in performance than on the printed page. One of the main difficulties for theorists of an organic ...”

“... taken a monumental strong-arm operation of persuasion and coercion, the sort to make even Lyndon Johnson quail. Instead, he threw the case to people who didn’t even know the phone numbers of the people they needed to call. It really was one of those what-if moments. Not: what if the president of the United States were revealed to be an evil ...”

“... was over it effectively ceased to exist. It is true that individual politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove will be pursued by some of their referendum pledges for as long as they are part of a government tasked with delivering on the result. But they have the advantage of being able to claim that the voters should judge them on their record in ...”

“... was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and public meetings ...”

“... they fail to see in it a reflection of the particular social conditions of modernity. For Samuel Johnson, it was the socially typical which was imaginatively enthralling, and aberration which was boring. Johnson had a proudly populist trust in the robustness of routine meanings, and saw language as embodying the common ...”

“... as the archetypal Delta bluesman, a precursor to Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James and Robert Johnson: vagrants, rounders, always on the move – pursued, as Handy put it, by ‘suffering and hard luck’, conceiving their music ‘in aching hearts’. Hari Kunzru’s new novel is, among other things, a fictional meditation on the figure of the ...”

“... or “prisoner”’ of her former joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Boris Johnson, letting off steam after a tough session at Number Ten with the chiefs of staff, alluded to Hill’s crusading work against people trafficking: ‘That’s modern slavery, right there.’ Under May the Blairite informality of shirtsleeve, sofa government ...”

“... divided but exceptionally feeble. One needn’t be quite as scathing about Neil Kinnock as R.W. Johnson has recently been in these columns in order to agree with him that the idea of Kinnock at No 10 is disturbingly like the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House. And one needn’t put too much weight on Peter Jenkins’s account of Mrs Thatcher in tears ...”

“... it tends to make their characters pretty angry. Made to suffer cancer, Christie Malry warns B.S. Johnson that he will look stupid when they discover a cure, and anyway, ‘you shouldn’t be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it.’ Jonathan Coe drops in to tell Maxwell Sim that his book is about to end; Sim ...”

“... failed to respond to this compliment with any valuable acknowledgment, Thomson, Aaron Hill and David Mallet prepared satirical verses on unsatisfactory patrons to preface the second edition of ‘Winter’. Compton stepped in in time (with civility and 20 guineas), and Thomson judiciously persuaded his friends to tone down their verses, or at least to ...”

“... Sidmouth strategy. For they cannot help reminding us, rather forcibly, of the Five Acts that Boris Johnson’s government passed in March and April 2022. In both sets of laws, the justification is nugatory, the likely effect questionable and the side effects shameful; but the politics are blatant. The Five Acts are worth examining singly and collectively in ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... the Pinochet coup. Was there any contact between the Thatcher entourage and such groups as Colonel David Stirling’s GB 75? Did Mrs Thatcher know that Airey Neave had been involved in discussions about raising a ‘resistance army’ if Labour were returned in 1979? 3. Airey Neave was later killed by a car bomb outside the House of Commons. It has always been ...”

“... Rhondda and took nearly half the seats in the Senedd. In London, Sadiq Khan exceeded both of Boris Johnson’s mayoral victories, in vote share as well as final margin of victory. There were also positive micro stories: Labour made gains in southern coastal towns such as Worthing, university towns such as Falmouth and commuter-belt towns around London; the ...”