Search Results

“... in inglorious circumstances. A girl he was chasing had a long-standing promise to go to an Oxford ball with a man; Ian begged her not to fulfil it, and said that if she did, he would bunk off to London and sleep with a prostitute. She did, and he did, and he caught gonorrhoea. The streak of recklessness and self-pity in this – the mixture of drama-queenery ...”

“... who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to ...”

“... Joe said. ‘But he never won a thing.’ The Streak, the marriage to Monroe, the reference in the Simon and Garfunkel song (‘Where have you gone . . .’) and the old geezer waving to the crowd at Yankee Stadium are as much of DiMaggio as most people know – or knew before this book was published. ‘The Hero’s Life’ of Cramer’s subtitle is not to ...”

“... jerky bowling action (they suspect him of achieving his extraordinary bounce by chucking the ball rather than bowling it). Muralitharan didn’t disappoint either his supporters or his critics, but the Australians had the last laugh. Ponting’s team won 3-0, despite the fact that they conceded a first innings lead in each game, and despite ...”

“... a British soldier was killed when he drove over an IED. 26 June. I met a company commander, Simon Butt from the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, today. He described the area we’ll be entering when a big operation starts in a few days. It’s called the Green Zone, because it’s a solitary strip of fertile land about a mile wide that follows the ...”

“... itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of ...”

“... lot of you and replace you with them.’ On another occasion she had scrunched a news list into a ball and hurled it at him, screaming and slamming the door on the morning editorial conference. In 2004 alone, the Sun paid sources at least £362,000 in cash; Graham Dudman, then managing editor, kept £25,000 in his safe. Asked how much went to public ...”

“... successors as health secretary, was paid £60,000. The revolving door has become a blur. Simon Stevens, Blair’s special adviser on health, is now an executive vice president at UnitedHealth, one of America’s largest private health companies. Mark Britnell, a career NHS manager who rose to become one of the most powerful civil servants in the ...”

“... Simon​ de Pury, assisted by ‘a regular contributor to Vanity Fair’, has written a book about his ascent to the top of the art world: the auctions he conducted, the deals he struck, the parties he attended. It resembles a board game, with smaller parts assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king ...”

“... from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – ...”

“... many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that train. But the theatrical grandeur of its arrival always alters my sense of my surroundings, as if a door had opened, offering a glimpse of an ...”

“... students, who, more maidenly than the average batch of 16-year-olds, appear at a Fancy Dress Ball provocatively equipped with plunging necklines or decked out in top hat and whiskers. It is present in the language of Olivia’s ‘indefinite desire’, which has her aching, awakening and dissolving; it is present in Mlle Julie’s promise that, St ...”

“... you’d fuck. People used him that way. His office was a social focal point.’ If you didn’t ball Doctor Roberts, it was probably because you had to go off and appear on television. Doctors seem to have been good dealers in those days. Edie staggers through this world, to go on to, say, the back room at the club Max’s Kansas City (‘how many pills can ...”

“... or another he deems such critics and artists as Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Yves Klein and Simon Hantaï, not to mention all the Angry Young Men, ‘apolitical and fascistic’, and even the once-recruited Spur artists are soon dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Sentiments like this one – ‘we already have amongst us too many young artistic elderly who ...”

“... about his own interior drama. His name came up the second time I met Lady Diana, at a fancy-dress ball. Once more I was lucky enough to draw her as a dinner partner. I was pretending to be an Australian in a black tie while she was in her standard outfit as a nun. On her right she had the Arab who was financing the party. He was dressed as a sheik but that ...”