Search Results

“... variety of causes, in which the common theme has been a desire to take on the evil-doers, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein. The United States is a great country for political romantics because there is always something going on. There are almost limitless occasions on which to display yourself. But what’s wrong with ...”

“... a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it is far from ...”

“... everyone who is granted unrestricted access to secrets beyond top secret. He remembers telling Henry Kissinger in a briefing after Kissinger had become Nixon’s National Security Adviser: After you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more ...”

“... as an experiment I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow ...”

“... cheering, great sociability. A ball is arranged, but before it the Captain of the Alcyone, Sir Henry Somerset, and his wife ask Talbot to dinner: he is still somewhat dazed from bangs on the head and heavy doses of the ship’s panacea, a tincture of opium, but he goes and he is instantly enraptured by Miss Chumley, an orphan Lady Somerset is taking out to ...”

“... months may seem an expressionist touch, but it corresponds to the conditions of life in Bowling Green, the town on which Purdy based it.Again Snyder hails the bravery involved: ‘The topic of same-sex love and desire was edgy for a novel published nine years before the Stonewall Inn protest. It was also risky, given the neglect and criticism Gore Vidal and ...”

“... lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember: No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush Of Lad’s-love, or Old Man, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end. (‘Old Man’) It is odd, as John Bayley noted in an essay two decades ago, how frequently the poetry conveys ...”

“... playmates and arrange a proper reunion. Having put Rabbit Angstrom to rest and closed the book on Henry Bech, Updike understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered ...”

“... scandals when women were disfigured by often lead-based face powders. It was only in 1866 that Henry Tetlow of Philadelphia discovered that zinc oxide made a non-toxic face powder and only in 1873 that the first lead-free make-up for stage actors was created, by the German opera singer and chemist Ludwig Leichner. In 1911, Grumme, a Swedish soap ...”

“... progressive activists. ‘Both parties do the same thing, one covertly, one overtly,’ he told a Green Party gathering in 2001. ‘Which one is going to get more people mad? Which one is going to get more people organised?’ The questions depend on a familiar leftist cliché – the worse things get, the better they get. But if Nader’s dismissal of the ...”

“... discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up by the Astors, and Henry VIII’s Eltham Palace, which acquired a dazzling if slightly incongruous extension in the Moderne style for the Courtaulds. Estate agents were not slow to take note of the historical wow factor and Tinniswood notes that extensive as Elizabeth I’s ...”

“... having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the ...”

“... on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper and mechanised commander, McChrystal rose quickly through the ranks. He was deployed for a few months to Afghanistan in 2002 before returning to serve in the office of the Joint Chiefs as the Pentagon’s debriefer to Congress and the ...”

“... is not only a composite of three much older nations, but also fractured throughout by regionalism. Henry James is quoted to the effect that Warwickshire ‘is the core and centre of the English world ... unmitigated England’. Conversely, the gardens of Wallington in far Northumberland are Scottish in style. And Blickling in Norfolk is as culturally and ...”

“... we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter Fame, Malcolm meets her in London at the ...”