Search Results

“... Deacon from 1992 until his death in 2015, a day before his 93rd birthday.In his Guardian obituary, Jonathan Glancey described Allan as ‘the world’s best known and probably its most successful railway publisher’. The only books now published by his successors at the Ian Allan Group are about Freemasonry: A Guide to Masonic Symbolism, A Handbook for the ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... as many pages are dedicated to the three years 1977-79, when Deng was manoeuvring towards supreme power, as to the ten from 1979 to 1989, when the economic reforms with which he is usually credited were introduced. The conventional judgment is that these were his principal achievement as a ruler, and one might have expected them to loom equally large in ...”

“... Sovereignty: supremacy in respect of power, domination or rank; supreme dominion, authority, or rule. OED Without conflicting mental reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour ...”

“... nose and goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal process. He will surprise many who worked with Tyrone Guthrie by ...”

“... with a stronger sense of pleasurable exchange than of fundamental wealth production with its power of ultimate determination – not economic reality but fiduciary notes. Paper money may suggest a completed transition from Marxist materialism to a Structuralist sovereignty of signs, but it is not so. Paper money is still money. Rather Greenblatt emerges ...”

“... Africa ceased to be a country where races were segregated by law. Yet no one in a position of power was called to account for the relegation of millions of South Africans to derelict Bantustans, the forcible removal of hundreds of thousands of non-white urban dwellers to shanty towns and rural areas, the coercive discrimination in every aspect of public ...”

“... that the unemployment rate now stands at its highest since 1949, the year the Communist Party took power. The downturn could prove the first real threat to the regime since the 1989 Tiananmen protests. It challenges the wisdom of Beijing’s economic model, and threatens to break the implicit bargain between China’s middle classes and its rulers, whereby the ...”

“... to pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-aesthetes, such as she was and is, because it has great gossipy power and can draw on history and mythology and concepts like blood and gold. It can seem to explain a lot. And it can form a bond between upper-crust types and the plebeians, a bond of sturdy race and nation against the clever and the tricky and the ‘hard to ...”

“... because ‘sperm for him was an emission of cerebral matter and as it were a waste of creative power.’ This theory, shared with Balzac, that ‘you can’t be more than one kind of athlete at a time’, is surely undermined by Olivier’s later sexual prowess – the result of a few sympathetic, extra-marital affairs which cured his tendency to premature ...”

“... of his narrator, his own version of the surreal everydayness of American life. In the Crowds and Power restaurant, people of various races tell each other jokes. Here, Max courts Lily; he makes friends with Lincoln and his greyhound, Cobb; they all become pals, and as Lily’s confidence in Max grows, the two take off for a holiday to France after, of ...”

“... them, not always accurately, for alleged alliances with the Tories.) As the results came in, Jonathan Bartley, the co-leader of the English Greens, dashed across the country to cheer his party’s achievements; Keir Starmer locked himself in his reshuffle bunker. Labour has developed a singular inability to appreciate what it gets right. The enthusiasm ...”

“... even those that are called experimental. Usually in such books – in B.S. Johnson, say, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) – the messing around with words is designed to be expressive: this page is split in half because the character is in two minds; this page is fragmented because the character cannot hear. The ...”

“... e lo mio di fuori lo dimostra in alcuna nuova sembianza’; ‘[this thought hath such lordly power] that my heart (that is, my inner man) trembles, and my outward man shows it by taking on a new semblance.’ (The italics are mine; the translation is Katharine Hillard’s 1889 version.) The people whom Dante encounters are seen with their inner selves on ...”

“... open.’ The facts themselves, undressed, intoxicate her; ordinary things turn out to have strange power to move us, banality itself is mysterious, accumulations of detail take flight into commentary and insight. Anita Brookner is more like Bowen than Munro. ‘One Sunday, when an iron cold and stillness had settled over London, when the false early spring was ...”