Search Results

“... utterly dishonest – and this is as good as people get in his world. Like Poe’s Pym or William Wilson, Thompson’s characters endure only so long as they dissemble; once they admit to who they really are, they’re reduced to their essential constituent parts – a spattering of raw flesh, an aimless cry in the dark. These are truly visceral ...”

“... did Mr Murdoch a huge service when it published the full text of Lord McGregor’s letter to Sir David Calcutt. In that remarkable document the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission exposed the degree to which the Princess of Wales actively stoked up press interest in the state of her marriage. What is more, it turned out that the facts contained in ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... in for the kill as their old middlebrow bête noire found itself middle-aged and broke. Harold Wilson and Spike Milligan joined forces to save it, but the D’Oyly Carte Company sank in 1982, scuppered by the Arts Council. The hope and expectation clearly was that the whole show would vanish with it. HMS Pinafore would go down with the last of the ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... to 2 p.m. MPs had to come from their constituencies a.m. and get back to evening meetings p.m.! David Stod-dart (Swindon) had the foresight to see that a three-hour debate would keep out most backbenchers, and called a division suggesting it should be a five-hour debate. Defeated! The end-result was two hours and 40 minutes. With four Front Bench speeches ...”

“... zones’ across the territory it seized – territory which the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, has referred to as having been ‘liberated’. Gary Jones, BP’s regional president for Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, has used similar language, telling an audience at Energy Week 2022 that Karabakh is the ‘perfect opportunity for a fully ...”

“... fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of almost every ...”

“... but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in 1895), Rosenberg’s writing displays a sense of the continuity between a past passionately experienced through poetry and spiritual tradition, and a nearly intolerable present. Rosenberg’s parents were Russian ...”

“... as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business but also of big government, except as a regulator ...”

“... iced water, was a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive ...”

“... learn, a sexual signal pitched above heterosexual hearing. Mauro is in town with homely, miserable David, who imagines that his parents will be reassured to see him with someone so personable and charming. Mauro isn’t a paid escort, although David has lent him money that isn’t going to come back, and this is a small way ...”

“... Ellison like to make lists of the amazing prodigies that flowed to him from his single novel. David Remnick, writing in the New Yorker in 1994, noted the ‘National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a place in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a position at New York University as ...”

“... denied such a thoughtful conclusion, though there were Regular Army types like the snarling Arnold Wilson, a sort of Cheltenham Man, who would have been delighted to afford it him. Instead, his post-conflict life was the strange half-world of Shaw and Ross, a couple of flaunted incognitos worn during his days as a ranker. They have fascinated posterity and ...”

“... his closest to recent studies in the politics of literature by British literary historians such as David Norbrook and Jonathan Dollimore. These essays, which originated as lectures, are certainly dazzling performances. To historians like myself, what is most impressive about them is not the attention to historical context, which we have been trained to ...”