Search Results

“... that still ruled Europe in the years before 1914, Wilhelm’s inordinate loquacity stood out. Tsar Nicholas II was retiring by nature and George V was painfully shy. Scarcely a peep was heard in public from the elderly Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, a notoriously austere and laconic figure. And the contrast is heightened in retrospect by the fact that ...”

“... if Wyatt literally saw Anne’s beheading from his cell. It would have been an oblique view at best, fitting for a poet whose verse unswervingly resists directness. Opacity was a necessity for a court poet serving a king who killed over words; ‘familiar secret talk, nothing affirming’ had been enough to condemn Thomas More. As a result Wyatt’s verse ...”

“... Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins (1725), he voices anxiety ‘lest this Factum for Abbée des Rues, and the Revival of Marvell’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head’, and then adds defiantly that ‘as to the Principles ...”

“... need for funds seems to have driven Kibaki to make his alliance with Moi and his wealthy henchman Nicholas Biwott. Rewards necessarily followed. The big winner in the new cabinet is George Saitoti, who has been made minister for internal security. Although his background is in academia, Saitoti amassed a fortune while serving as a minister under President ...”

“... George Carman QC, the best known British advocate of his time, died of cancer on 2 January last year. Shortly afterwards, the Daily Telegraph published an obituary which listed the famous criminal and libel cases he had won, and examined his ferocious court-room reputation before concluding: ‘Away from work, Carman was a reasonably enthusiastic guest on the party circuit, but essentially lived a quiet life ...”

“... After the Fascists took over (the country and the paper), he went back to Trieste, getting by as best he could, eventually leaving for Paris in 1935 when, ‘with Mussolini’s ghastly war in Ethiopia, he could bear it no longer.’ Along with eight or nine other Italian émigrés, Weisz is on the editorial board of Liberazione, a samizdat liberal monthly ...”

“... aesthetics, particularly as epitomised by the novels of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul). Nicholas Marston, writing on Schumann’s heroes Schubert, Beethoven and Bach, quotes the 19-year-old composer telling Wieck: ‘when I play Schubert, it’s as if I were reading a novel “composed” by Jean Paul.’ And in his chapter on Schumann’s ‘Novel ...”

“... he was right.’ The sheep – the farmyard’s lumpen-proletariat – have failed. The best hope lies in the foxes: furry class warriors, voteless and mute. Mullin is awed by power as well as alienated. The diaries display what might be called the Yahweh syndrome, the self-imposed embargo on calling the supreme being by name. In Alan Clark’s ...”

“... to hold such esoteric ideas, although most other leading Nazis treated them with disdain.* In 1985 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke drew attention in The Occult Roots of Nazism to the ideas of Ariosophy, pioneered before the First World War by the Austrian racist Lanz von Liebenfels, as well as to the doctrines of Guido von List, another Austrian esotericist. These ...”

“... and designer Hans Schmoller. Yet from the beginning Pevsner had a nose for the English specialists best able to help him. Cultivated clergymen, cataloguers of dovecots, the devoted biographers of local architects and minor stained-glass artists populate the acknowledgments, from R.W. Wailes, expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary ...”

“... had displaced horses. It was unhelpful at the time that quantitative economic historians such as Nicholas Crafts were debunking simplistic stories of the industrial revolution. But such subtleties were ignored in favour of the fables spun by future Nobel Prize winners such as the economist William Nordhaus, who insisted that economic growth should not be ...”

“... alternative to Sikorsky, they agreed, should be put together, and the Government should do its best to encourage it. Heseltine was out of the country in early November, but when he returned he set his mind to the task. On 26 November, he met Sir John Cuckney, who from the outset was anxious to proceed with the Sikorsky take-over, and told him he was ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... of Philby’s funeral in Moscow:In London, Philby’s old comrade from the days of War Station XB, Nicholas Elliott, was in his club at St James’s at about this time, giving thought to a scheme to disrupt any attempt by the KGB leadership to iconise Philby posthumously, as indeed was their intention. The idea that formed in Elliott’s mind was that the ...”

“... the questions on race relations were especially insistent. After some forty minutes of doing my best as a striving white liberal, I turned the tables and asked the students about Gypsies – whom only one girl in the whole class could tell me of, because she was one. Political leaders, however, don’t generally talk to students, and never discover the ...”