Search Results

“... France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until ...”

“... Khartoum, is being destroyed in a fight to the death between two venal, brutal generals. This is a war of choice; allowing it to happen was a failure of international diplomacy. But if we look at the city’s 200-year history, the fighting shouldn’t be a surprise. Khartoum was founded on a command post built for the purposes of imperial robbery – and every ...”

“... not convert their errors into anything but folly. But why is this? And who are they?They are a class, as Roy Foster says, the old Ascendancy in Ireland. Elsewhere Yeats borrows a phrase from the poem to talk about Lady Gregory, who is said to be ‘indifferent to praise or blame’, a quality attributed to the law that was one of the pretty toys ...”

“... it would no longer be necessary to supply it with faulty intelligence about Iraq, nor would the war between the two states be allowed to go on as it has for the last eight years. Since Saudi Arabia had already been dragged into these schemes, one could foresee Israeli and US planners delighting in a forecast that would include bilateral negotiations between ...”

“... of a certain noblesse oblige. They probably believed that sentiment had its origins in an upper-class conviction that ratings were naturally as well as institutionally and socially inferior to officers, a conviction they had long since rejected. They were, however, quite clear about the advantages of rank, and if for some it had entailed notions of ...”

“... insist there should be no second-best solutions for countries just because they are poor and war-torn. Too often, the same coterie of international civil servants decamps from contracts in Kosovo to East Timor to Liberia, bringing with them the same working culture and the same formula for state-building. State-builders ignore vernacular politics, to the ...”

“... Benn returned the feeling. Having learned to fly himself in the RAF towards the end of the war, he had glimpsed the great pyramid of repute which mounted from humble students like himself towards the shadowy apex where the mighty test pilots belonged, men like Trubshaw and his military counterparts Roly Beamont and Eric Brown, men who were stuffed with ...”

“... of Nations’ was noted in 1870 – the sight of two country lovers during the Franco-Prussian war – but not given poetic form until 1914. Such memories, like the poetic spark that’s ‘frozen and delayed’, are the source and resource of the great late poetry. It is a poetry of dispersed memories, not of shaping autobiography, haunted by the lives of ...”

“... the trappings of the culture they most strongly identified with, the Scottish Lowland upper middle class to which their mother belonged: armies of servants, big houses and neo-aristocratic leisure pursuits. My father was born in Madras (now Chennai) in 1936. Apart from a brief visit when he was six months old he first saw Britain aged nine, at the end of the ...”

“... Her most recent novel, Gier (published in English as Greed), concerns a man not dissimilar in class and background to Josef Fritzl. Kurt Janisch is a country policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl by pressing on her carotid artery while she is giving him a blowjob in the back of his patrol car, and then dumps her body in the local lake. The considerable ...”

“... of the poet, the poetry was usually treated as quite impersonal. It had come, in the post-war years, under heavy academic protection: this was a time when potent professors wanted to exclude biography from the institutional study of literature. Eliot’s own doctrine of poetic impersonality had contributed to the formation of this austere ...”

“... hidden it deep beneath princess-and-pea layers of material: Florence after the Second World War (Innocence), Moscow just before the First (The Beginning of Spring), Cambridge at around the same period (The Gate of Angels), pre-Napoleonic Saxony (The Blue Flower). One imagines the author building up the research, bit by bit, joining it from many ...”

“... his destination as 414 West First Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Unfortunately, his third-class ticket was for the Titanic. The other, ‘Hadman E.’, was recorded among the columns of the dead on the King’s Cross war memorial. Heroic efforts by Anna, trips to Kew, Clerkenwell, days trawling the ...”

“... Douglas-ScottWe​ learned soon after his victory that the new prime minister has convened a ‘war cabinet’ to prepare for Brexit. Yet the only war is the one Britain has declared on itself. Let us be clear what a no deal Brexit is likely to involve: food shortages; immobile freight traffic at Dover; medicine shortages ...”

“... It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record briefings, the supplanting of Brownite X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous accusations from 10 Downing Street of lunacy in Number 11 – while ...”