Search Results

“... an appalling versifier and a devout right-winger – though some suspect that these manifestations may be the ingenious cover of a dangerous revolutionary. Cook himself, of course, A.B. Cook VI, is one of the novel’s seven correspondents, but properly speaking he enters the proceedings only half-way through the narrative. Before that, he has been represented ...”

“... virtue of sincerity: in particular, a sincerity which, in the absence of agreed ethical standards, may dangerously take on the role of providing the ethical standard all by itself. She points out that those who denounced the insincerities of Victorian capitalism probably did less, in doing that, to alleviate its horrors than the liberal reformers who had their ...”

“... And he has been energetic in removing officials appointed in the complacent Brezhnev era. It may be that the Politburo got more than it bargained for when it chose Gorbachev as General Secretary: not only a dynamic leader able to shake the system up, but one who appears to have chosen to lead from the radical wing of the Party. The two latest studies of ...”

“... three who more than any of their contemporaries figure on the school and university syllabus. It may be said of course that the three of them have in common nothing more than outstanding accomplishment: but Crozier, cogently, I think, contends that this isn’t so – that the obvious differences between them mask a set of common assumptions. His tone is ...”

“... the overmastering hate or love of any two people’? I suspect in passing that that cant phrase may have derived not only from ‘popular science’ but from scenes like the one the narrator records of undergraduates ‘making for the river’ carrying what he misnames ‘the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw’, though in point of pedantic fact it is in ...”

“... Whim, caprice, irrationality and antisocial activities are given the protection of law; the owner may do what all or most of his neighbours decry.’ Is this the case? Hamlet thought there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Can our motives taint our otherwise lawful acts of ownership? If so, can those we have maliciously targeted prevent ...”

“... left the Navy. With the final victory over Napoleon his career prospects were diminished and it may well have been, as Slater surmises, that he was disgusted by what he had seen in the service, particularly the flogging of men and the caning, or worse, of boys. It may also have been that his increasingly distressed family ...”

“... lively extrovert of the title proposes an excursion to the theatre, where he and his companions may hear ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,/Warble his native woodnotes wild’. Whatever Harold Bloomian Oedipal reasons one may impute for Milton’s decision to turn his towering literary precursor into an untaught ...”

“... with photos of Callas and others; they were packaged as ‘FREE vintage divas’.) All this may sound fairly trivial (unless you happened to be singing Amneris), but the sustained furore it caused in the media shows once again how unstable, potent and alluring a mixture the words ‘Italian’, ‘opera’ and ‘singer’ can still be. Even people who ...”

“... cognitive and evolutionary psychology. Whatever reservations that second proposition may invite, Boyer is surely correct in saying that some beliefs about supernatural beings are better candidates for propagation within an established system of ideas than others. No anthropologist ever has, or ever will, come back from the field with an account ...”

“... familiar. Companies can make contractual agreements because we have legal rules to determine who may act on their behalf: the CEO of Tesco can make agreements for the company, a temp stacking shelves can’t. The rules that determine who can make agreements on behalf of the state are part of the constitution. Kings once made these agreements, and were bound ...”

“... as possible with a loss that is permanent and irreparable. But no matter what the relationship may be, it has so little social recognition that a person with ‘only’ a dog for company is considered to be ‘alone’. Dogs have never been considered an appropriate subject for serious scholarship, certainly not in the humanities. Alice Kuzniar tells us ...”

“... a beautifully written book, a tribute to the English prose which they rightly value. Some of them may not be quite so happy about his assertion that the style favoured by top civil servants is bland and neutral: that toughness and the ability to take decisions and carry through difficult policies are not considered to be great virtues, that problems are not ...”

“... On 12 May​ , ten days after Reform swept the local elections, Keir Starmer launched a white paper with the title ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’. The timing was a coincidence, he said: ‘People who like politics will try to make this all about politics,’ but ‘it is what I believe in.’ Among other measures – fewer visas for skilled workers, stricter language requirements, more deportations – the government wants to reduce the number of international students in the UK ...”

“... interpretations advanced by other scholars and critics. But however unusual this volume may look in comparison with the kind of ambitiously interpretative catalogue we have become used to, it is entirely characteristic of the series of catalogues of major exhibitions of 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven ...”