Search Results

“... for episode one, to five million for episodes two and three, to 3.8 million for episode four. This means that 3.2 million people never discovered that ‘Dennis Potter’ was the author of it all, but perhaps they are the 3.2 million who felt it was sufficient to know that Dennis Potter without the quotation marks wrote the piece and made a quality decision to ...”

“... more dramatic than in Miami, a great resort and retirement capital for the Northeast, now – as David Rieff puts it in Going to Miami – a mirror city to Havana. There have been no less than five recent books on Miami, of which those by Rieff and Joan Didion,* quite different in tone and treatment, are the most prominent. Miami has also become crucial to ...”

“... stuff of most opinion polling and social science. As their title suggests, SCPR surveys are by no means confined to politics. Food, health and diet, for example, come within the range of the present study. Though registering a continuing change in attitudes in favour of what the experts now consider to be healthy food items, the 1987 survey also identifies ...”

“... always identified as the Assunta by Italians, never the Assunzione. It​ is understandable that David Ekserdjian consistently adopts the modern museum-type categorisation of subjects. His massive and very impressive book is remarkable for the range of altarpieces he considers, covering the whole of Italy from the early 13th century to 1600, many of them ...”

“... One of the strongest and strangest moments in David Lynch’s unsettling TV serial Twin Peaks, part of the dream of wholesome investigating agent Dale Cooper, comes when he is kissed full on the mouth by the figure of Laura Palmer, who was a ‘wild girl’ but is now dead and whose murderer he has come to town to detect ...”

“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... or for an attractive formulation of ideas, he was the perfect refutation of colonialist disdain. David Goldsworthy, the Australian scholar who is Mboya’s second biographer – the first, Alan Rake, wrote his book in 1962 – has produced an efficient interim study of his career, which examines in a sensible way the main issues it presents. He never met his ...”

“... with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to disentangle. David Ekserdjian’s book illustrates all of Correggio’s paintings, great and small, superbly well, together with many of his drawings. In the latter we can watch him weaving his compositions with a nervous pen line; giving them more unity, more softness and ...”

“... to detect this temporal exchange. When Nead describes Miss Havisham’s Satis House in David Lean’s adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) as a ‘Gothic bombsite’ – which it wasn’t – we are assured that it exhibits the ‘colour of the period’, which seems to mean low-key lighting, glutinous blackness and overwrought decor. Cinema is ...”

“... her, canny presence, still winking at the audience. The strongly theatrical heritage of servants means that fiction’s pretensions to realistic truth are challenged by their presence. The servant’s disobedience, or even fidelity, becomes a means of breaking free from the ground rules of realism. Freedom within service ...”

“... activity of the mind, which for Sibiya in Mating Birds as well as for Francesca in Lost Time means horrid imaginings, displacement and a fear of poltergeists. Capitulation is charted: Sibiya awaits execution in a Durban jail, although the Government is about to fall and from his cell he can hear street-singers announcing ‘the near-dawn of ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in ...”

“... and expressed their ‘absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means . . . and opposition to any use or threat of force by others’. The deadline for the completion of decommissioning was two years from the signing of the Agreement, a period subsequently defined as ending in May 2000 – but no date was specified for ...”

“... maverick, self-regarding tendencies of architects with every bone in his body. Yet he was by no means unwilling to see promise when he met it, even in unlikely quarters. He admired architects working in a contemporary vernacular, such as the Norfolk practice, Tayler and Green, whose council estates and old people’s bungalows were built of brick and ...”

“... now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”