Search Results

“... of British Communism, a volume of essays combining research and recollections. Today Samuel is best known for his work on popular memory and for History Workshop. John Merrick’s new selection of his essays aims to rectify that: it brings together a sample of Samuel’s historical studies, several of which are still thrilling to read, and most of which ...”

“... in the book has a through-line, it is the battle of his ‘I’ with his ‘want’. Father Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The ...”

“... who had by then published several major biographies (Flaubert, Maupassant, Apollinaire), but was best known as a translator of Flaubert – had met Greene years before in America, when he was still with his first wife. Hazzard would go on to write a clutch of spiky, ambitious novels including The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great ...”

“... Bierce, The Devil’s DictionaryStalemate beneath the dense sky of moratorium agreements: the best we can hope for Europe ... But there is no escape route in sight. You feel you are standing at bay. Australia is not a way out.Christa Wolf, CassandraThe city of Sydney has one decent road to the airport because of the Queen’s visit in 1963; the royal ...”

“... career, and he often succeeded. His closest colleagues from his time at the Treasury, including Geoffrey Robinson, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, remained remarkably loyal. But there was​ , inevitably, a downside. The higher he rose, the more political these friendships became. Being part of Gordon’s band was not a costless enterprise – it deeply alienated ...”

“... piss it off – was the windfall tax on profits imposed in 1981 by Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe. (Blair or Brown would never dream of doing anything like that to the City.) But the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the increasingly international flow of capital, combined with the abolition of restrictions on trading practices which ...”

“... although the media may have been important in spreading knowledge about these developments. At its best, the press has been able to influence opinion, but it has never enjoyed the power to determine the course of events, or the way people think. Nonetheless, one of the popular myths about the press is that it enjoys independent power – for example, the power ...”

“... were so serious that they couldn’t be contained politically. In a 2013 study, the historian Geoffrey Parker argued that the ‘general crisis’ of the 17th century, a litany of wars, invasions, rebellions, massacres, epidemics and famines, can be explained by the Little Ice Age. Others have seen the origins of the French Revolution in climate ...”

“... silly, but the mimicry gave them some satisfaction, a small revenge on the man who was doing his best to send them to prison for the rest of their lives – and if Terry McCluskie and Raymond Reynolds, on trial for murder, with the experience of Brixton’s hospital wing etched in their memories, behaved ‘unattractively’ in court, it was to show that ...”

“... admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had shown some of his work. Europe, Pound could testify, was the best, the only place for any American aspirant to literary or artistic preferment. If you can make it there, he insisted, you can make it anywhere, especially back home in a cultural dependency like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and ...”

“... More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To More the best form of government was an aristocracy, not a monarchy. His preference was shared by Thomas Starkey, whose Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, dated too late by Mayer’s predecessors, is placed by his careful scholarship around 1529-32. Time and again the ...”

“... of civilisation – one has only to scratch them to lay bare the wolf-skin underneath,’ and the best solution would be a universal bloodbath, after which the oppressors will find it is a bit late to be sorry ‘they left the hordes in that state of ignorance and savagery they enjoy today.’ Sardism gave way to the more positive and universal creed of ...”

“... government, is the effect on developing and transitional economies of wooing away their best and brightest in such a massive, multilateral brain drain. Beyond that, the flurry of efforts to draw skilled labour into the dominant industrial sector seems to point to the globalisation of labour, or at least the beginnings of it; to the development of a ...”

“... crimes no matter where or by whom or against whom they were committed. It afforded probably the best legal foundation for Israel’s trial of Eichmann. But universal jurisdiction under customary international law tends to be marginalised in modern state practice by the incorporation of treaties either by automatic constitutional assimilation, as in the ...”

“... not always with positive results: between the wars, Bermondsey council had developed some of the best health services in the country, funded by higher rates, but was forced to reduce them once it became clear they were no longer affordable in a standardised national system. As the century wore on, local authorities were reduced to mere agents of the central ...”