Search Results

“... coalition’, ‘citizens of nowhere’) has been flung about like confetti. Some characters (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt) have kept reappearing in different costumes; others (Gavin Williamson) played cameos which, in retrospect, seem scarcely real.One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according ...”

“... of female society), those who play professional football do not: they are still overwhelmingly young workingclass men. Which brings us to Arsenal. To the extent that any individual club historically stands for this culture (for better and worse) it is Arsenal: no other club has had such continuous membership of whatever has been at the time the senior ...”

“... the masters and who the prentices? Davie quotes Canto 80: ‘For “prodigies” (“Mr Binyon’s young prodigies”) surely we ought to read “protégés”.’ But we shouldn’t delete ‘prodigies’: to lose the pun would be to lose the lugubrious implication that, in this day and age and art, a protégé would be a prodigy. Davie is obliged to ...”

“... Over the past year evidence has been emerging that the Japanese kidnapped more than 200,000 young women into sex slavery during their occupation of East Asia. Those so enslaved were termed ‘comfort women’, about 80 per cent of whom were Korean. Some were as young as 12, hauled out of their schools, often under a quota system, and carted off to army barracks and outposts all the way from Manchuria to the South Pacific ...”

“... in response to male beauty, whether the speaker is Michelangelo in old age rhapsodising over the young Roman nobleman Tommaso de Cavalieri (‘And never have I burned and frozen/More than I have for you,/Messer Tommaso’), or the Sybil recalling her affair with Apollo (‘The shadowy body, the bare breast,/And dusk like nakedness and dew like ...”

“... in Burma and the Far East. They had titles like Beware of women, My seven daughters are after young boys, and Money hard to get but easy to spend. Like the home movies, which are in many ways their successors, they had no artistic pretensions, but were concerned only to reach the widest possible audience. They were churned out at high speed and quickly ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now ...”

“... in the Sixties rather than the Fifties. The evidence, however, is far from convincing. As Michael Banton points out, there has been some reduction between the Sixties and the Eighties in standard social-distance scores, measured as willingness or otherwise to accept black people as neighbours, friends, fellow workers. He regards this as a reason for ...”

“... within the rich cultures and subcultures of agitation in and out of doors. In the light of this, Michael Duffy, as general editor of this series, has rightly decided that a substantial explanatory introduction was needed for each volume and he has assembled a first-rate team of historians to address such problems. Several have interpreted their brief as ...”

“... in a post-war DP camp, where Stanislaw is forced to witness his wife’s execution, and young Rudi is imprisoned in a hole in the ground – a horror from which he never recovers. The surviving Kabbels emigrate to Australia. Essentially stateless, they fill the political emptiness of their lives with apocalyptic mysticism. Convinced that a purifying ...”

“... is instructive to compare it with that masterpiece of invention, Larkin’s poem on looking at a young girl’s photograph album.’ The comparison isn’t made, so the instruction is hypothetical, but Bayley’s general patience is clarified by what it has to put up with in Ashbery’s Shadow Train. Bayley has defended his criteria in several other ...”

“... one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.’This realisation, as Michael Lewis recounts in The Undoing Project, his story of the intellectual partnership of Kahneman and Tversky, had an important effect on Kahneman’s work, and on his and Tversky’s efforts to overturn some of the basic assumptions of 20th-century social ...”

“... smitten with the rackety self-destruction of Zevon’s life (terrified of doctors, dying all too young), and cherishes the howling poetry of his lyrics. The Q whom Specktor kissed had once been involved with Zevon, and Specktor asked her: ‘Did you ever forgive him?’ She looks at him and ponders, like a Tuesday Weld close-up: ‘I never thought of it that ...”

“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles were ...”

“... also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the 1960s. After profiting as one of Rachman’s rent-collectors in the 1950s, he became a West London drugs baron and then, under his new name, head of the ...”