Search Results

“... the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink. And there were the Americans. I remember James Fenton noticing how they would cluster a little closer together and talk in a fashion slightly more intense. Mainly Rhodes or Fulbright scholars, they had come from every state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were ...”

“... his wartime driver, Kate Summersby Morgan, does not seem likely to persist, and was only a rumour. Frank Saunders, the driver who worked for President Kennedy’s parents, proceeds by innuendo rather than by rumour. The President, he tells us, did not like to sleep alone and when no one else was present, made use of a mysterious college friend, called Lem ...”

“... and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages ...”

“... years he just got hotter and hotter, probably helped, as he himself acknowledged, by the death of James Dean in 1955. Dean had been slated to play the middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me; Newman was asked to replace him.‘By now, I’d become something of a movie star,’ Newman said of the success of Cat on a Hot Tin ...”

“... Fuzzy and Jean at school, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson, Janetta in Ibiza. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going ...”

“... was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings twice, surging through Chandler, Faulkner, film noir, the extraordinary novels of Chester Himes and on towards Rechy, Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. Davis acutely points out that noir – dystopian revulsion at the ...”

“... at this stage, and which terminate in this motto, a motto employed, for a different purpose, in Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image – it may be that they are all true. But it may also be that he is at home with contradiction, growing up as he did in the shadow of that riven rock, the Catholic Protestant policeman. Some of his contradictions might be deemed ...”

“... shield against ultraviolet light, be quite as dangerous as hydrogen bombs? Dyson points to James Lovelock’s Gaia, the notion that ‘the chemistry and ecology of Earth are linked in a single system that keeps the environment of the planet within limits tolerable to life.’ ‘I find the Gaia theory plausible,’ he comments, adding that ‘we know ...”

“... that then ruled the Arsenal changing rooms. Adams’s treatment of Bergkamp is nothing if not frank. His first serious reference to him is to note that he refused Adams’s offer of help with his fear of flying (a fear Adams shared) – ‘it didn’t seem like he wanted any help at that time.’ His second is to report the telling of home ...”

“... never resolve the uncertainty, which can leave the thrust of their essays a little obscure: both Frank Hahn and Partha Dasgupta, for instance, argue that utilitarianism is compatible with respect for individual rights, Hahn because of the utility which people derive from the fulfilment of their rights and Dasgupta (more persuasively, perhaps) because of ...”

“... was special. Mies van der Rohe was asked to design it after a committee had considered both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: Phyllis Lambert, an architect and the daughter of the head of Seagram, persuaded her father that the opportunity to give New York a great building should not be lost. The Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor – a ...”

“... calls them) taken from the fiction of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy and James. As usual her commentary is essayistically loose. But one is struck by how good a reader she is. She is at her best when most closely interacting with the text, intelligently ‘feeling’ the novel, as it were. In the Dickens chapter, she illuminates the ...”

“... is nonetheless something remarkable about such an outbreak of locutory primness in a normally frank and free-spoken people. Euphemisms crop up in other connections: for instance, in the extraordinary modesty of boo-docks for buttocks, or buns, bunky, bungkajeenis (perhaps a spoof word) for your mere quotidian bum – which is admittedly not a word for ...”

“... who might with reason feel a sense of grievance at Davis’s historiographical bugaboo is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and ...”

“... the world of business whether they want to or not, and the connection is eerily alive in Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Mack the Knife’, where he sings of making an offer you can’t refuse. There is almost too much to unravel here. The song comes from (the English translation of) Brecht’s re-creation of Gay’s play, and has been separately ...”