Search Results

“... the patronising smugness. At that point they really will have paid the price for Blair’s war. Mary Beard In the States, the coalition has already attracted far more media attention than is usually bestowed on matters British. This is partly because the very idea of a coalition government appears extraordinary here, given the scale and anger of partisan ...”

“... favour had overseen the peaceful transfer of the English throne from James II to William and Mary; practical questions about when, after moments of rebellion or usurpation, it was proper to give de facto allegiance to a newly ‘settled’ government; and historical arguments about the preservation of the ancient English constitution. The term ...”

“... opening this quasi-facsimile edition: the typeface is patently of two centuries later, and indeed Gordon Campbell comes clean in his appended essay. The Gothic or black-letter type of the original is thought to be too difficult to read easily, even for the sort of people who would enjoy such a volume. That has an unfortunate side effect common to any modern ...”

“... and colourful Omega rugs. Manners also relaxed. Young men used each others’ first names and in Gordon Square for the whole of Christmas 1905 Virginia ‘never once changed for dinner which is my height of bliss’. But of course she hadn’t cooked the dinner. Sophie Farrell and Maud Chart, the cook and housemaid from Hyde Park Gate, had come with the ...”

“... that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater that he was the authorised biographer and carted away about half of them in a hansom cab. Since he was not even mentioned in Manning’s will, he had no claim at all to act in this way. The unfortunate Bodley was abroad at the time ...”

“... cities consumed it with fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that ...”

“... hidey-holes in whatever she said.’In his acknowledgments to this book, Lutz proclaims: ‘To Gordon Lish I owe everything.’ Asked about Lish’s influence on his work in a 2006 interview, Lutz recalled ‘nosing about in bookstores in the mid-1980s’ and being ‘struck by certain slim books of prose fiction in which the sentences all but protruded ...”

“... statement of un-English vehemence. Un-modern-English, one corrects oneself, passing St Mary Woolnoth’s rusticated walls as one heads down Lombard Street to get another view of Lloyd’s. How did it happen? How was Lloyd’s persuaded to buy this kind of architecture? Its equivalent in gents’ suiting would scandalise the trading floor – a ...”

“... and before we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term ...”

“... survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a hypothetical ...”

“... George Perry, with the assistance of Alfred Bestall who carried on the feature after its creator Mary Tourtel retired, has produced a fanzine, an anthology and bibliography all in one.† Criticism is beside the point: if Paul McCartney likes Rupert Bear enough to make a cartoon feature (it is due out in a few years), if Perry can be believed when he writes ...”

“... Daniels, the Sainsburys, the Guinnesses, the Marks and the Spencers, and of course dear old Mister Gordon and his fine distillery. These many named and unnamed of the acknowledgment pages are the foundations on which a book is built: they help to determine its size and shape, its character and its content, and they deserve our attention. When Helen Vendler ...”

“... many of their forebears left their homelands by choice. So why had Chrissie said that her forebear Mary Ann MacNeill (née MacCormick) was ‘cleared’? Those last islands had been drawing me for most of my life, not because of the hearty ‘Heel-yo-ho, boys’ of the ‘Mingulay Boat Song’, a foreign invention of the Thirties, but because they represented ...”

“... 17 May. Niall thinks the big house may have been a manse. I hope to find out more when I call on Mary Kate MacInnes in Glean tomorrow. We spend the day on Vatersay to the south. I went there with my wife in 1988 on a wee ferry shared with a collie dog, a bag of potatoes and a bag of onions. Now the narrows of the kyle are bridged by a ...”

“... as badly hurt as she was by the subsequent break-up of her wartime affair with the radio writer Gordon Glover. Robert Liddell, in his contribution to Dale Salwak’s volume, objects to too tragic a view of ‘Barbara’s hobby (generally enjoyable) of “unrequited love” ’, and as a friend of hers since 1932 his view has to be taken ...”