Search Results

“... Not even the most intransigent of the Old Guard can see any danger in Felipe Gonzalez. Spain may be a less interesting place now but it is much more prosperous. The most obvious physical change in recent years has been caused by the emergence of the foreign car as a status symbol: the streets of Madrid are clogged by rival fleets of BMW and Mercedes ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... their personal lives. ‘Though Judge Mellon had rebelled decisively against his own father,’ David Cannadine writes in his new biography of the judge’s son Andrew, ‘he had no intention of tolerating any such conduct in the next generation … The judge regarded his sons as essentially extensions of himself.’ When Andrew Mellon was in his teens, his ...”

“... to be me and not somebody’s idea of me.’ The final verdict on the television election, then, may be that both its novelty and its impact were much overrated; that, given the changes in technology and idiom, most of the tricks of populist media manipulation had been tried before – and anyway they did not make any difference in the end. What mattered was ...”

“... knock. In the Thirties, there were a number of editors to whom this could not have happened. They may have been right or wrong as political guides, but they were a power in the land and had secure arrangements with their publishers. J.L. Garvin, a gifted Irishman, edited the Observer (of which my father was proprietor) and wrote signed leaders for thirty ...”

“... makes it almost impossible to combine accuracy and accessibility. The technicalities of philosophy may not be as great as those of science, but they are enough to put much of what is written beyond the reach of most people. Even etnics, which touches our lives more closely than any other branch of philosophy, is now developing formidable intricacies, and in ...”

“... logo of the Pebble Beach Company. As such, the use of the tree’s image is regulated by law. It may not be photographed or reproduced for any commercial purpose.” ’ This dismaying parable epitomises Coates’s chief contention, that nature itself is something we rarely encounter now. What we pass through, and plough or chop down, and photograph or paint ...”

“... So he took the project underground and executed it in secret. Cheney issued the orders, his lawyer David Addington drew up the rationale, and Hayden at NSA made the practical arrangements. Eventually Cheney would appoint Hayden director of the CIA. Americans caught our first glimpse of the possible scope of NSA operations in December 2005 when the New York ...”

“... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...”

“... grinding task that has consumed almost all its energies. Now that one significant part of the task may be reaching a conclusion of sorts, the appetite to resume more conventional hostilities is palpable. The politicians want to give the voters permission to start caring again about the things they normally care about. Their problem is that the voters never ...”

“... which can be seen as a sort of compressed version of Guernica – whose dual models in Poussin and David are not painterly in style. Having gone further here than ever before into the post-Renaissance tradition, Picasso soon turned his back on it to work, more characteristically, in a pre-Giottesque tradition. If his painting of the period preceding his late ...”

“... French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at ...”

“... When​ the Australian cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed tampering with the ball during last year’s test series in South Africa there was, along with all the faux outrage, some genuine incredulity. Why did they take such an insane risk? The subterfuge was so cack-handed – rubbing the ball with lurid yellow sandpaper, perfectly suited to be picked up by the TV cameras – and the potential rewards so slight that they seemed to be putting their careers on the line for next to nothing ...”

“... and ill-considered) reaction against the generous concessions made to Egypt at Camp David: the war in the Lebanon was the second. Arik Sharon, who dates the start of his planning the war from the day he took office as Minister of Defence in July 1981, spelled out his views in a (Jewish) New Year issue of the muck-raking weekly Ha’olam ...”

“... with them an ‘essential sadness’ never to be surmounted. Exile, however positive its outcomes may seem for those countries generous or opportunistic enough to offer homes to top research scientists and famous writers, is not fun for most of those on whom it is visited. Indeed, extreme and even tragic suffering seems to have been the experience of huge ...”