Search Results

“... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...”

“... which are still not in place. All through the rest of 1989 the Scottish police beavered away. In May they found more clues. A group of Palestinian terrorists were arrested in Sweden, among them Abu Talb. Talb’s German flat was raided. It was full of clothing bought in Malta. The forensic evidence showed that the Lockerbie cassette-bomb had been ...”

“... pregnant with a view to avoiding, a custodial sentence. The possibility, however, that other women may do that is one of many factors I have to bear in mind in this difficult case.’ Spot the difference? The whole nasty episode situates Pickles in the body of judges who send women to prison more often and for longer than men with similar records who are ...”

“... murder earlier this year. How did we come to this? In Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, David Healy goes back to the Greeks and Romans in search of an explanation. There are good reasons for this. Very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric ...”

“... televised debate, epitomises his ambivalent relationship with the medium. In Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg argues that Nixon was the first American president pre-eminently concerned with the construction of his image.* Unlike Kennedy, his nemesis, Nixon was a self-made man; he didn’t have the benefit of an extremely wealthy and well-connected ...”

“... country to ‘strange adventures’. Nowadays the picture seems less clear. Imperial enthusiasm may have militated in favour of the Unionists, but it hardly created a ‘tidal wave’. Their massive majority in seats was based on a much less impressive preponderance of votes, and the same is true of their victory in the so-called ‘Khaki’ election of ...”

“... second major setback was Binyamin Netanyahu’s victory against Shimon Peres in the elections of May 1996. Netanyahu was a sworn enemy of the Oslo Accords, viewing them as incompatible both with Israel’s security and with its historic right to the Biblical homeland. But he knew that two thirds of the Israeli public supported the Accords and the policy of ...”

“... called ‘too slow’. Somnolent, smeary, subatomic, the first couple of times you hear it you may wonder, as with my early morning news report, if it wasn’t just a dream. Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He played in rock bands. He wrote and played experimental modern classical music. He was an ...”

“... A layman might be forgiven for assuming that those two at least were on the same side. But when David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, two young American scholars, cited Stedman Jones and Joyce as exemplars of social history’s ‘linguistic turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman ...”

“... which he knows well instead of skipping round the world and across three millennia. It may be this diachronic range that makes Arabia ‘half empty’ on page 194 but endure ‘overcrowding’ by page 200. And as if to widen still further the range of conquest and imperialism, Kiernan takes women on board as having ‘a good claim to be classed as ...”

“... when in reality he was just a biddable grafter like the rest. Is it possible that such critiques may rest on not having actually read much of Burke? Certainly Berlin, in his generous way, conceded in a correspondence with O’Brien that ‘I really should not argue with you about Burke. I know virtually nothing about him except what most people know – the ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... decline of titular aristocrats, only occasionally taking in the untitled ‘patricians’. The David who mortally wounded this Goliath was Lloyd George. He was determined to deprive the landlords of both power and wealth – and he partly succeeded. The small squirearchy were for the most part financially and politically wiped out by the 1920s. The ...”

“... hard on the connection. Suppose that a man and woman are getting married. The bride feels that she may be making a mistake, that she will be swamped by her more successful husband-to-be. Weeks ago, she had been reading about a new dam being built in China, which had involved the flooding of entire villages and the obliterating of the evidence of hundreds of ...”

“... transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual significance for the three great ...”