Search Results

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted ...”

“... The serene face of Michael Faraday radiates from all directions: first in disguised profile on a postage stamp, then more handsomely on the £20 note. Illuminating the dark warrens of the London Underground, he now advertises an exhibition at the Science Museum to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth. Visitors to this intimate and thoughtful display are reminded of how much the modern world owes to the gentle giant of experimental science, whose insights into electro-magnetism were eventually to find application in motors and machines which transformed human life even as they transformed electrical currents ...”

“... there is no greater ambition than to live and die in Santa Monica. ‘If I ever get the choice,’ Michael Moorcock declares, ‘that’s where I would cheerfully end my days.’ This is simply the most recent turn in what has proved to be one of the greatest tragic-comic intercontinental love stories of all time. Not too long ago lucred Yankee cognoscenti ...”

“... the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said. Stick it up your punter! tells that story, and the story of what happened afterwards: a story which social ...”

“... and by no means as radical as some of those she appointed to run the Church would have wished. Robert Whiting’s book assesses the impact of all these changes in the parishes. His is a study of the religion of ordinary people in Devon and Cornwall. Meticulous and thorough, the fruit of years of reflection and hard work in the archives, it suffers from a ...”

“... far as the beginning of the century. In a paper published in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain people’. In his Medieval ...”

“... children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park. If you had to guess what lay inside you might hazard a hedge fund, or a tax avoidance consultancy, or empty space, left to fatten. Experimental art and its practitioners, surely, left ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”

“... and the classics get retrospective plastic surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. Anne Hathaway’s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane Austen’s blurry features – a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for ...”

“... another factor, which Mortimer is the first biographer to be able to take into account. In 1998, Michael Bennett revealed that a badly burned charter in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and ...”

“... yell of dissent against Conservatism as we know it. Echoing the Red Toryism recently espoused by Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, who proposed rebranding the Conservatives as the Workers’ Party, the manifesto loudly repudiated ‘untrammelled free markets’ and sent out a confident, demotic counter-echo to Thatcher’s notorious claim that there was no such ...”

“... been an obvious candidate. In respect of high office at least, the ‘public career’ with which Robert Stewart’s book is concerned ended in the reign of William IV: but Brougham – who, if he had indeed been decapitated, would surely have walked and above all talked for long enough after the event – lived on until Victoria had reigned for over thirty ...”

“... diverse group with impressive credentials: for example, the former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff; Bruce Blair, who has written extensively about nuclear command and control issues; Fred Iklé, who headed the US Arms Control and Disarmament ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”