Search Results

“... Parliament. The argument against was rehearsed at the eleventh hour by Lord Chalfont, talking to David Dimbleby on BBC 1. Lord Chalfont was against the televising of the House of Lords because he suspected that it was just a stratagem on the part of the broadcasters so that they could force the door of the House of Commons, after which the House of ...”

“... death in 1969. That year came two editions of the Memoirs, one edited by Pierre Citron, the other David Cairns’s translation. Critical editions of Berlioz’s other writings, and his Correspondance Générale, are well advanced; critical and analytical scholarship has moved into top gear in Germany, the United States and Britain; the New Berlioz ...”

“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”

“... photographs would give insights into madness. In the pictures of psychiatric patients taken by Hugh Diamond in the 1870s, the girls look less mad than trapped; they could be acting the part of one of Dickens’s wild, angry young women. Forbidden and shocking images proliferated. Pornographers found photography a lucrative medium (although there is nothing ...”

“... Stanley said he thought his own phone was tapped too – by his own members. Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, the ‘terrible twins’ of the Trade Unions in the period which toppled the Heath Government, became the leading spokesmen for wage restraint and cuts during the Labour Government, and were rewarded by being blacklisted by MI5. Benn confirms that ...”

“... no conceivable interest to anyone but himself, they are at least factual. This point is reached by Hugh Macdonald’s Music in 1853. Macdonald might not need consolation. He is the author of books that palpably enrich and illuminate. His Master Musicians Berlioz is one of the best volumes in that series. He has been a brilliant editor of several of Berlioz’s ...”

“... David Bohm and Basil Hiley worked together for twenty years and between them developed a very unusual approach to quantum theory. Bohm died in 1992, but by then the book was almost complete. It is a magnificent monument to one of this century’s finest and most attractive minds. Painfully shy, and finding few fellow physicists willing to give a hearing to his new ideas, Bohm struggled for four decades to get beyond the orthodox views that he had himself defended in his Quantum Theory of 1951, long the subject’s standard textbook, but which later put him in mind of Escher’s Waterfall, whose careful construction cannot hide the fact that the water must at some stage be flowing uphill ...”

“... and so on). Even early in the book, where events repeat more or less exactly, there are off notes. Hugh and Sylvie, Ursula’s parents, move after their marriage into a house near Beaconsfield, ‘vaguely Lutyens in style’. They decide the house needs a name, which seems odd in itself since they aren’t the first occupiers and so a name would have been ...”

“... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...”

“... equally predictable bursting of the bubble. But it was never like that. The greatest merit of Hugh Stephenson’s dispassionate account of the first eighteen months, from the Limehouse Declaration to the election of Roy Jenkins as leader, is to make sense of what was happening without retrospective distortion. (The greatest lapse of the book is its silly ...”

“... has often been remarked, would be remembered only as a failure if he had died at the same age as Hugh Gaitskell. Lloyd George, for all his political skills, destroyed his own career and his party with it. And would anyone, during the constitutional clashes of 1910, have dreamed that the first Labour government with an overall majority in the House of ...”

“... recent Clear (2004), a short but bounding novel in which characters theorise about the illusionist David Blaine, are set in London, but Barker’s territory is the hinterlands of the South-East, where literature doesn’t tend to happen – Luton, Canvey Island, the Isle of Sheppey, Ashford (‘gateway to Europe’). Despite the prizes – the Booker ...”

“... critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of encounters, pilgrimages and epiphanies, the will to ...”

“... journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher writes, that an ‘infidel’ writer such as Hume had no right to such marks of ‘politeness and respect’ from Christian ...”

“... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...”