Search Results

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... underside of the 1960s fixation on beautiful young people, the hangers-on and the left-behinds, as David Widgery once put it, ‘who hung on to the myths and … ended up in a mess’. It’s spooky the way Carter describes Honeybuzzard, with his ‘soft, squashy-nosed, full-lipped face’, his ‘new, very white, very frilly shirt’, and Ghislaine, with her ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... development, logging, drilling and mining in natural habitats. The secretary of the interior, David Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist, announces that the act will be ‘modernised’: economic factors, rather than exclusively scientific ones, will be used to determine eligibility for protection. The ‘foreseeable future’, written in the ...”

“... pounds’ worth of gold: the link between currency and gold was ended in 1971, and anyway, Gordon Brown sold off the Bank of England’s gold reserves in the 1990s. The fact is, there’s no answer to the question, ten pounds of what? The ten pound note is worth what it claims it is because the state, in the form of the Bank of England, says so, and we choose ...”

“... we built a raft from old oil-drums, and, too afraid to sail on it ourselves, we tethered one of David Luck’s hapless chickens to its deck and sent it on a squawking unhappy journey downstream. Another time we constructed an elaborate camp on a small island in the middle of a pond with a rope drawbridge worked by discarded bell-ropes from the Church.I only ...”

“... He was still not an independent actor, remaining, in the matter-of-fact judgment of Judith Brown, in her biography of Nehru, an ‘utterly reliable’ prop of the old guard within the party.At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Congress high command instructed all its provincial governments to resign in protest at the viceroy’s declaration of ...”