Search Results

“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... of child labour in London, the return to his mother in Brighton. His autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord!, fills them out in greater detail, but also offers a caveat: no ‘fiction-monger’ writing a memoir can be trusted, he says, since he will ‘helplessly, perhaps even thoughtlessly, but more probably designedly, select, omit, minimise, exaggerate, in fact ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian denomination, and so ...”

“... This place rumourd to have been a City surely was, separated from us by the hand of the Lord. The devout have laid out gardens in the desert, drawn water from springs where the light was blighted. How tenderly they must attend these friendships or all is lost. All is lost. Only the faithful hold this place green. Sometimes his taste for the eternal ...”

“... coffin, with Kenyatta letting them stay and hold on to their farms if they wanted – came when Lord Lambton, about as kosher an aristocrat as you could find in Britain, turned against them over Hola. The puzzle is why they were allowed to get away with it for so long. It was not as if there were no protests in Britain. The British people have never been ...”

“... returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. It may seem ‘far-fetched’, Sharpe acknowledges, to connect the ...”

“... growth of tension between court and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary ...”

“... Cocteau, Eugene Berman, Poulenc, Henze, Boulez, Copland, Carlos Chávez, Charles-Albert Cingria, Lord Berners, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Edward James, Kopeikine (Balanchine’s pianist) e tutti quanti – surely reflects his relationship with his brother.’ But the claim that Walsh avoided ‘accurately informed people ...”

“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... women who had escaped from their owners in London, only to be recaptured, came to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner ...”

“... the image of the moustachioed bandido, which morphs smoothly into that of the moustachioed drug lord. The association of Mexico with violence takes an even more pernicious form in the minds of repressed intellectuals, who celebrate the everyday mayhem in a poor country with a deplorable judicial system as evidence of some more honest, vital relationship ...”

“... of mischief (‘it never occurs to you you’ll be rejected’). In interviews, she claimed both James Boswell and Giuseppe Verdi as ancestors; it’s not impossible, with the middle name Boswell and a mother née Verdi, but there’s a whiff of family romance to this self-construction. She wrote little about her mother, though it’s clear their ...”