Search Results

“... of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts programmers ...”

“... Werther is the moment of his nearest identity with his public, Urfaust is the first major work in which he establishes the initial distance of his own subjectivity from that of his contemporaries which will be characteristic of all his subsequent writing.’ Goethe is becoming Goethe as Boyle sees him, and ‘initial distance’ is the phrase ...”

“... with the play’s own title. Both the printing of the play in the First Folio, and the law student John Manningham’s account of the production at Middle Temple in 1602, stress that the play’s full title is Twelfth Night, or What You Will – with the suggestion that the second phrase modifies the first rather than substitutes for it. In 1662 Samuel Pepys ...”

“... Punic Wars. As late as the Twenties there were only four chemotherapeutic compounds. To be sure, major killers disappeared periodically but not through the agency of doctors or the power of science. Thus in medicine – unlike physics, chemistry or engineering – an immense accumulation of learning from the scientific revolution to our own century had ...”

“... slightly more objectively when he summarises the poet’s life after youth as ‘a steady march of major works and a most unedifying and intricate mess of quarrel and intrigue’. Mack’s ‘advocacy’ of the poet makes him choose to interpret this history in terms of a psychology less literary than largely social. ‘The poet in his world’ consists in a ...”

“... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...”

“... cart as well. We can’t be sure about this yet, in the darkling subsidence of Majorism. However, John Redwood, Sir George Gardiner and Michaels Howard and Portillo are scarcely arguments against the view. ‘The source of the authority and legitimacy of government ... the personification of the nation ... an institution vital to our national ...”

“... harder edges of Thatchersim have been rubbed into a certain fubsiness by a ‘kinder, gentler’ John Major. What seems to be gathering power among the middle and professional classes is a new republicanism, a desire for a complete political representation of the Whig dream. This was Margaret Thatcher’s dream also, and why she cried (when given the ...”

“... an eating insecurity, a covetous desire to earn acceptance and approval from those in authority. John Sutherland points to this paradox as the driving force behind Mary Ward’s extraordinary career. He isn’t inclined to condone the various obstinacies that made ‘The Great Mary’ (Pound’s term) so scorned among the writers who followed her. Her moral ...”

“... that they could look like each other – Botticelli’s work being unmistakably quattrocento. John Gage suggests, on the evidence of Pliny’s account, that ‘Apelles was clearly one of those rare Greek artists whose works could be vividly imagined.’ I am doubtful about this. Pliny seems to have inferred from the austerity of means the austerity of ...”

“... big event (and even the Serie A game between Roma and Inter postponed to the following day). Pope John Paul II is to celebrate a televised mass in St Peter’s, and then travel down to San Giovanni Rotondo to celebrate Mass there. The millions of pellegrini in attendance are to be transported by more than five thousand coaches (100 from Poland alone) and 19 ...”

“... In later years the scene darkened. There was an intellectual restlessness abroad in the college. John Maynard Keynes appeared (from Eton, indeed, where he had been in Pop), and as a very junior fellow announced that he had ‘had a good look round this place and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’ Plainly, rows lay ahead, and Monty ...”

“... you see?’ He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. ‘Bokansky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!’ The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. Twenty-six years ago ...”

“... developed, to the bafflement or anger of hard-line physical-force men like O’Donovan Rossa or John O’Leary. W.B. Yeats consigned Romantic Ireland to the grave with O’Leary: Davitt discovered its terminal weakness much earlier. He outgrew the Fenian romanticism of his youth – in Moody’s words, ‘the practical revolutionist in Davitt was disgusted ...”

“... this ugly reality. Their incomplete mental adjustment to the fact of partition is the subject of John Bowman’s remarkable study. His revisionist stance may seem unnecessarily aggressive – it is after all no secret that in the private session of Dail Eireann on 22 December 1921 de Valera endorsed the so-called ‘county option’ – but he points out ...”