Search Results

“... Thomas Edison invented himself, and then he invented the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite ...”

“... Not surprisingly, a number of the Freedom Riders later became important advocates of black power. William Worthy and Conrad Lynn – two of the members of the original Journey of Reconciliation – created the all-black Freedom Now Party less than two years after the Rides ended. By 1965, CORE had jettisoned its integrationism for an emphasis on black-led ...”

“... and to enslave a young white American woman who’s engaged to one of his neighbours. As Kyle William Bishop writes in American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, ‘this germinal film presented audiences with the exoticism of the Caribbean, a fear of domination and subversion, and the perpetuation of the ...”

“... fable was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their lives ...”

“... analysis of the complex linguistic territory of speech as a form of action was presented as the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955 and published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words. It is his most enduring theoretical contribution to the philosophy of language. And he may have thought of it as a contribution to a larger project – Rowe’s ...”

“... momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the ...”

“... after his death, do not disguise an essential seediness. It is noted by his first biographer, William Cooke, that he ‘took snuff in such quantities as often rendered him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr ...”

“... spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only on his very ...”

“... because few knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-field heroes – A.E. Stoddart, William Scotton, Arthur Shrewsbury – killed themselves after their careers ended, unable to cope with the loss of fame and/or money. Audiences demanded swagger in music too, forcing that poor ambitious provincial Edward Elgar to respond with ‘Land of Hope and ...”

“... were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of Worcester Cathedral, also lately a Benedictine monastery. While abbot of Evesham, Hawford had been a loyal henchman of Cromwell’s, but as dean at ...”

“... are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from the shared world of trench-mud with astonishing freshness. And Gurney, at least, would have approved Taylor’s chosen prelude, a poem by that patron of all things common, Walt Whitman, whose work he appears to have encountered ...”

“... less than three hours later. All of the women survived. Most of the men would die as gentlemen. Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, inspected the damage soon after the collision, told Captain Smith that it was mathematically impossible for the Titanic to stay afloat for much more than two hours, and then quietly awaited his death after helping people ...”

“... that puts them beyond query. The man who did much of the pioneering work for the Civil War – Thomas Livermore – was himself a veteran of the war who went on to a career in law and business. He was not a professional historian or demographer. And his interest in the historical record was very different from ours: his aim was to show that the soldiers of ...”

“... had a harder time of it. Churchill’s features were in constant motion, reflecting a temperament William Orpen described as ‘wax and quicksilver’. Sickert’s oil painting of 1927 best catches that plasticity in an image that recalls the similarly sandy and baby-faced Dylan Thomas. Churchill’s longest-lasting, albeit ...”

“... leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar.”’ Carnegie might well have wondered whether Thomas Mellon, in passing on his huge fortune to his son Andrew, had not bestowed on him a curse rather than a blessing. The two families made their fortunes in Pittsburgh after emigrating in the first half of the 19th century: the Mellons from County Tyrone in ...”