Search Results

“... hapless Labour Government could not be expected to have foreseen or averted, much less mastered. John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reached for a mechanical metaphor appropriate to the current state of the art. ‘We have magneto trouble,’ he wrote in December 1930. ‘How, then, can we start up again?’ Keynesian policies, at the time and ...”

“... On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning history in favour of such invertebrate programmes of study as those which go under the name of ...”

“... modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham ...”

“... Europe and where not physically present was widely adopted as a currency of account. It was a major coup for what was then a small commercial centre. There was no king’s or duke’s head on the florin. Florence had long since banned nobility from involvement in its government, which was now republican, the nine executive members elected by lot from ...”

“... habit of infidelity and eventually left his wife for good in 1901, when Lewis was 18; and Augustus John, his celebrated predecessor at the Slade, whom he sought assiduously to emulate, and whose ever-varying seraglio became an object of fascination. But Lewis’s presentation of himself to women, and to the men with whom he conferred about women, had a ...”

“... it is?’ ‘No,’ said the man, and he shook out his newspaper, leaving my father to walk away. John McGahern went to London in 1954 to work for a few months on the building sites: ‘When I walked off the boat at Holyhead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great English writers I had read and studied – I ...”

“... with an unimpaired confidence in the traditional weapons and ammunition. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, produced under the auspices of the Royal Economic Society, is among the glories of modern publishing. Printed at the Cambridge University Press, these handsome volumes maintain aesthetic standards in book production which are in themselves a ...”

“... John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy grin conceals volumes.) When Updike was but a sprig, apprenticing at the New Yorker and carving out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... liberties as an expression of royal weakness. The outpouring of royal charters under Richard I and John has traditionally been regarded as the equivalent of selling the ancestral silver for petty cash. Paradoxically, this reading derives from another aspect of belief in the feudal system. If a ruler’s power consists of rights deriving from the overlordship ...”

“... two spells in the Third. A hundred years is a long time to go without even a whiff of the game’s major prizes – no League titles, no FA Cups, not even a cup-run to speak of – but Boro fans have never seemed to mind. Mid-table mediocrity (preferably in Division One) has always been the most that they’d allow themselves to hope for. Reaching, say, the ...”

“... smiles which the author cannot have intended. Kingsley Amis used to quote a novel by his friend John Braine (it sounded too good to be true and I never found it in Braine’s oeuvre) in which a woman says to the hero as they lie together, naked in the afternoon: ‘It isn’t bloody fair’ (or words to this effect): ‘not only are you a best-selling ...”

“... us, within a broad chronological framework, what is really a series of interpretative essays on major themes, ranging from ‘empires, nations, minorities’ and ‘the crisis of capitalism’ (both interwar) to ‘the social contract in crisis’ (Western Europe and Thatcherism) and ‘the collapse of Communism’. This assumes a fair degree of prior ...”