Search Results

“... if Northrop Frye played video games. It’s true that it’s difficult to imagine the doyen of North American literary criticism with his pouchy features shivering over the levers while the reflected white-line paddles of Pong tracked up and down his spectacle lenses; yet when it – the first true video game – hit the arcades, Frye was just sixty. Such ...”

“... of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I ...”

“... Town. So I went to visit it. When you walk in, you wonder if you’ve somehow wandered into a North London satellite of Tate Modern. Unlike most receptions, Reception here appears eager to offer you a decent reception, and the building is full of colour, light, optimism and efficiency. People smile. It’s a palace, actually, or a modern church of the ...”

“... that they were not training manuals for life.’ At eight he was sent away to prep school, North Foreland Court in Kent, which ‘took seriously its duty of preparing small boys for life’s unpleasantness’, and where he was predictably miserable. He went from there to Eton, at a time – the 1960s – when it was still turning out ‘prefects rather ...”

“... they were never going to be able to penetrate the narrow alleyways of the sprawling slums in the north and west of the city. In most cases they didn’t even try. Muqtada’s forces responded, as they have in the past when facing an attack in one place, by spreading the battle to Baghdad and every other city and town where their forces are strong. Local ...”

“... to Rio is called Lady Metroland. Her husband, Viscount Metroland, takes his ‘funny name’ (as Paul Pennyfeather sees it) from a fantasy fiefdom of the London Metropolitan Railway, an advertising man’s conceit which tickled the imagination of the public in the 1920s. Metroland was the commuter catchment area for the line running ...”

“... the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence ...”

“... novel set in wartime Belfast; the second and third have as protagonists Irishmen in exile in North America; and the first tells the story of Diarmuid Devine, a teacher, who stayed behind in Belfast. ‘The climate of Northern Ireland ... is such as to encourage weakness of character,’ Moore wrote. The interesting thing about Devine was, compared to ...”

“... Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second World War, the asylums of North Africa, clandestine anti-colonial work. Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, the fifth of eight children. His father, Félix, a customs inspector, was a descendant of free black cocoa farmers. His mother, Eléanoro, a ...”

“... know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north, somewhat.’ I heard the US was building 14 ‘enduring bases’, capable of housing 110,000 soldiers, and I heard Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt call them ‘a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East’. I heard that the US was building what ...”

“... split the civilian élites that had hitherto supported it, as many of the landed notables of the North-East – the core of its system of political alliances – defected to the opposition. The military held off the pressure from the streets, but at the cost of losing control of Congress, where a ‘liberal front’ of retrograde landowners and local ...”

“... light until dusk; 100 tons of bombs were dropped in a single day, but Neugass was still a long way north-east of Teruel with a ridge of mountains to cross. The Republican armies held their ground. Early in January, Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, Franco’s commanding officer in Teruel, surrendered the town to the government. By then Neugass, Barsky, the medics and ...”

“... Mbembe was told that he’d been accused of antisemitism. The festival is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which – like most German states – has in recent years cancelled funding for organisations and individuals with ties to the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. Mbembe’s case made headlines. Even some of the more conservative German papers ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of ...”