Search Results

“... good journalists with the novelist’s mania, a certain passion for what can’t easily be said, and a zeal of conscience. In the better cases all this gathers itself rhythmically at the level of language. In the Greenock of Ascherson’s novel, people don’t look, they ‘keek’; people don’t cry, they ‘greet’; and children don’t yearn for a ...”

“... and Edwin was never to share Emily’s enthusiasm for the seaside (like half an apple, he said). The letters between them, which are the primary documentary source of Mary Lutyens’s book, are, when they deal with their feelings for each other, full of affectionate apologies, loving reassurances and tender explanations: but as they began, so they ...”

“... name. The London Evening News printed its afternoon editions on primrose paper. Margot Asquith said that ‘when the Prince of Wales went up the aisle, he was a nobody compared to Rosebery.’ Until 1951 the Scottish football team would often turn out in primrose and rose hoops, the racing colours of Rosebery, who was their honorary president. Long after ...”

“... inflames him, and then cunningly announces that she is embarking on a trip. ‘Darling Hera,’ said Zeus, ‘surely another day will do as well? Let us make love at once! Never in my entire life have I felt such intense longing for goddess or nymph as I feel for you this afternoon! Why, my interest in Ixion’s wife Dia, on whom I begot the wise ...”

“... Most versions of the story prefer a Housman who was ‘suicided’ by society – as Artaud said of Van Gogh – or, worse, a Housman who was his own natural victim, repressed and mined from within. The familiar tale includes his Worcestershire childhood among numerous siblings in Bromsgrove and its rural environs, looking across the Severn plain ...”

“... involved with, but the ‘show’: ‘Have you seen the show yet?’ Hamlet could seriously be said to be the greatest show on earth, a must for failing theatres and rising actors alike. In the 19th century in particular, its ghost, its court, its play scene and its duel scene, its mad adorable heroine and above all its sad soliloquising black-clad hero ...”

“... final pseudo-nuclear option. Not that the garotting of the NotW should jerk many tears. Some have said that its torrent of celebrity drivel, xenophobia, materialism, kitsch jingoism, shag-’n’-brag and bullying of the vulnerable should be written down as a cost of free speech. Maybe this stuff is to the red meat of political debate what cowpats are to ...”

“... well-paid occupation it was before 1978 when Jimmy Carter deregulated the aviation industry (with Edward Kennedy’s help) and the monopoly airlines had on their most profitable routes was lost. Sullenberger and Skiles have to hold down second jobs to make ends meet. It’s also a less glamorous profession – there’s so little for a pilot to do in the ...”

“... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...”

“... in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres’. To one Italian ...”

“... when he told them that water was coming in, they laughed. ‘Get back into bed,’ one of them said. ‘You’re not in Ireland now.’ August Wennerstrom, a Swedish pastor travelling with some of his flock, went straight to the third-class smoking-room. ‘We tried to get something to drink,’ he reported afterwards, ‘but the bar was closed. Nothing ...”

“... acquittal by a jury in June 1688 coincided with the birth of a male heir to the throne, James Edward Stuart. To the Protestant establishment this was the last straw. While gossip ran around that the child was not the royal couple’s and had been smuggled into the palace in a warming pan, ambitious politicians were converting to Catholicism. The Vicar of ...”

“... just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where Morant Bay lay, but excluded the town of Kingston. Although the uprising was put down within a week, in the month that passed before the decree ...”

“... won the war and Carthage lost it. On this subject the little dialogue in Brecht’s Galileo has said the last word: ‘Unhappy the country without heroes!’ – ‘No. Unhappy the country that needs them.’ How much difference did leadership make to the history of Britain from the Mid-Victorian era, when no great talents were needed to govern kingdom and ...”

“... a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from ...”