Search Results

“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... by a lot of in-group facetiousness at the start. Although G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica still lay four years in the future, Russell had available to him the typescript of some lectures that Moore had given in London during the previous year on ‘The Elements of Ethics’. In his paper he takes issue with Moore’s view that there can be good or bad ...”

“... Another such issue is whether 18th-century England may properly be called, as in the title of Paul Langford’s recent book, ‘a polite and commercial people’: a title which draws from Thompson the observation that ‘historical conferences on 18th-century questions tend to be places where the bland lead the bland.’ It’s hard nowadays to think of ...”

“... a stable majority for integration. The appearance of outside visitors, most notably Pope John Paul in late 1989, gave the East Timorese the sense that they had not been forgotten by the outside world, and increasingly they found opportunities to communicate with it. For the first time they began to organise demonstrations for independence, which, though ...”

“... one of Cumberland’s officers remarked, ‘but it was vain, they could not penetrate, and lay in Heaps.’ This ‘macabre deadlock’, as O’Keeffe calls it, lasted for perhaps half an hour before government reinforcements arrived to tip the balance. The Jacobite survivors of the crossfire began to retreat and then to run. On the left of the ...”

“... The work of Alphonse Bertillon, a police official working in Paris from the 1880s onwards, helped lay the ground for modern FRT. Unlike the eugenicist Francis Galton or the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed it was possible to read a person’s criminal type off his face, Bertillon was mundanely preoccupied with identifying criminals by recording ...”

“... less important as a signifier of classiness. (I was pleased to discover that, 23 years apart, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono both chose John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ as their favourite record.)Despite its slightly lacklustre start, Desert Island Discs picked up a following and ran for 67 episodes before being mothballed in 1946 after BBC radio was ...”

“... Tory venom. It’s worth considering what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days. It self-consciously repudiates the credentials of academic scholarship; it disparages the narrow technical expertise of the policy wonk; it cannot rest on the standing of achievement as a politician or novelist. In other words, it has ...”

“... she goes to her window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the ...”

“... to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is how it works; synergy, they call ...”

“... airport, but that it was nonetheless clear to him that the root of the country’s violence lay in social injustice. This is a common view (and has nothing to do with the airport) but it is increasingly being called into question. In a recent article, Paul Collier, the director of Development Research at the World ...”

“... Spring ends with the miracle of a river gushing from the place where the murdered girl’s body lay, while Breaking the Waves culminates in the miracle of celestial bells, ringing out for the innocence of Bess. Yet in Bergman’s film, sexual assault and murder take place in a single scene; in Breaking the Waves Bess offers herself up time and time ...”

“... taboo’. In his essay on Knight, Michael Taylor quotes the critic on the political theology that lay behind his poses – the thought that ‘the religious importance of literature’ should be proclaimed ‘in a voice of authority’ – and concludes that this phrase can be used to ‘sum up the direction and impact’ of his work. Knight’s entrée into ...”

“... liberal institutions’? This would only happen if the pope agreed to make concessions. But herein lay the problem: Pius’s commitment to reform had always been tightly circumscribed and the trauma of his flight into exile had hardened his politics and his personality. With extraordinary stubbornness he insisted that his restoration must be a restoration in ...”

“... forward by Southern senators in the lead-up to the Civil War. They believed the American future lay in alliances with the slave states of Cuba and Brazil. Only by ending the slave trade, thereby insulating themselves against British ambitions, could ideal slave societies flourish. These societies would reproduce slaves from the existing ...”