Search Results

“... derided by self-styled liberal pragmatists. Only a secular providentialist could ask what it means ‘to be on the right side of history’. Clinton poses this question as if it were a guide to policy. The notion that history has a discernible direction, and that nations must align themselves with it, is a relic of the grand historical narratives of the ...”

“... slips in beyond him in his capacity as master of Magdalene. Comforting presence though he is, this means I will be preaching (sic) a few feet along from the ex-archbishop of Canterbury. Still, at least he’s not the dreadful Geoffrey Fisher who when I was young was for years synonymous with the office. R. has insisted that I keep sitting down for most of the ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... older books, was hardly read outside the universities, and reported a drop in enrolments. David Lehman’s Signs of the Times similarly notes the ‘disquieting fact that the number of students electing to major in literature has steadily declined over the last twenty years’. The question of ‘theory’ is bound up with this, since, in Lehman’s ...”

“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... longer a word to be murmured with self-deprecation. It had become an enterprise, an undertaking, a means of finding ‘solutions’ for ‘problems’ in the present culture. In Scrutiny’s second issue, Leavis published an article that asked: ‘What’s wrong with Criticism?’ Desmond MacCarthy’s modest compilation handily supplied some of the ...”

“... his backdrop. In single scenes in Prêt-à-Porter, he creates an impression of physical depth by means of overlapping dialogue; over many scenes, by interweaving stories in a fugue-like manner, he creates a secondary, almost synaesthetic effect of stillness and contemplation. Other directors, notably Welles, have used overlapping or polyphonic dialogue, but ...”

“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... the members of the Labour group in the Lords. It is clearly a Good Thing, both in itself and as a means of projecting their own usefulness to the Labour cause, that they should inflict as many defeats on the Conservative Government as can be engineered. But it is also a Bad Thing in the sense that too frequent success could provide a framework for Tory peers ...”

“... had already been firmly established in the Bible as meaning ‘preacher’. ‘Amal, which means ‘suffering’ in Job and ‘effort’ or ‘labour’ in Ecclesiastes, is translated as ‘suffering works’ in order to give it a hint of Christian theology. In one of the documents ‘arelim, ‘uncircumcised’, is duly translated as that, but the ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... were painted by Abraham Bosschaert, an Antwerp painter displaced to the Hague: landscapes by David Vinckboons from Mechelen and Antwerp; and architectural fictions by Paulus Vredeman de Vries, another refugee from Antwerp who eventually settled in Amsterdam by way of Danzig and Prague. It is persuasively suggested that the marked specialisation ...”