Search Results

“... The Berni Inn and the denim loons – ah, yes. The Blue Nun. The chicken-in-a-basket. And John Denver singing ‘Annie’s Song’. Marvellous. But Coe also includes the text of a speech given by one of the characters in later life, looking back on the 1970s, and complaining that ‘people forget about the 1970s. They think it was about wide collars ...”

“... the Department of Health and Social Security to block imports from the US.In the same year, Dr John Craske, director of the Public Health Laboratory Service, co-ordinated a ‘hepatitis study’ to establish which blood products were most likely to transmit the various strains of hepatitis. Forty-five pupils at Treloar’s were enrolled: each was given ...”

“... of sheer doggedness that made him so formidable a defender of men like George Edalji and Oscar Slater, whom he saw as languishing in prison (or even, as in Slater’s case, under threat of the gallows) as a consequence of judicial error compounded by bureaucratic intransigence. Over all this ground great honour has to be ...”

“... Seamus Heaney feels to be more authentic than a professional job. Raine and his wife Ann Pasternak-Slater have themselves provided outstanding translations for Evgeny Pasternak’s study The Tragic Years. The book has the special advantage of coming from right inside the family, and Evgeny Pasternak’s portrait of his father is both affectionate and ...”

“... loud assurance, too. At this time I was living in the home of the playwright/librettist Montagu Slater, one of her co-founders of Left Review, and working at the arts journal Our Time with the poet Edgell Rickword, a co-organiser with her of work for Spain. Correctly deducing from this that I must be a Communist, Amabel considered a moment, then utterly ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... and mentors there – the First World War poet Edgell Rickword, Britten’s librettist Montagu Slater, the anti-racist francophile Nancy Cunard – was the folklorist A.L. Lloyd, who had swung about as collector through the whaling fleet, bushrangers in the Outback, American immigrants, mining communities worldwide, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and ...”

“... its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent Street to the Regent’s Park. The view south was to culminate in the Prince Regent’s Palace at Carlton House. Long before the work was ...”

“... Goldsmith in this lunch.) They then questioned, too, Goldsmith’s suitability to be chairman of Slater Walker, and a week later wrote of an ‘intriguing connection’ between Eric Levine, Goldsmith’s lawyer, and T. Dan Smith. ‘At no time during this period,’ writes Ingrams – or is it his libel lawyer? – ‘was I conscious that we were doing ...”

“... left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after ...”

“... also politically puzzling that an SNP-Green government and the Green biodiversity minister, Lorna Slater, are relying on investment bankers to oversee ecological restoration in a climate crisis. The formulation of the ‘finance gap for nature’ is itself a creative act of market-making by those who prefer landowners to be sweetened by profit rather than ...”

“... of a phone when Nora was 80 cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, the postman, on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was 85 meant that her friends gave up their twisting narrations in favour of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen for ever the ...”

“... in itself. We go on through the rooms, talking to all sorts of people – Jim Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who claims that the best conjunction he’s seen so far is George Steiner talking to Joan Collins.Come away at eight o’clock with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. ...”

“... As Songs of the Doomed so spectacularly illustrates, Doc’s the first American writer since John Dos Passos to tap the eroding and elemental fury within the American Dream and make the compost picture of American society in the last quarter of the 20th century work so elegantly on paper. I discovered two curious things about Doc’s writing when I was ...”

“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the ...”