Search Results

“... money, to invest in property: Umbria became a particular favourite, as did the high streets of major cities. Ignorant of foreign languages, unfamiliar with international banking practices, the semi-literate Calabrians could supply cocaine to distributors but turned to the Sicilians to launder their profits. With a century of experience in the export trade ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... shells on mountains, but the Flood was itself thought of in a variety of ways. Writing in 1695, John Woodward, an English physician and fossil collector, proposed that it resulted from a temporary suspension of gravity, during which all the materials of the Earth were churned up into a thick suspension. When gravity returned, the materials settled into the ...”

“... court, thus restoring the element of personal interaction to politics, and to government too. John Guy and others subjected the ideology and praxis of the Cromwellian reforms to detailed scrutiny. Insofar as English government was reinvented, anticipating and partly realising the emergence of the state as a public thing, the whole credit was not ...”

“... rented an adult film on motel pay-per-view. They were the victims of ‘total surveillance’, as John Parker calls it. Yet it mattered little – Atta’s driver’s licence may not have been in order but there were some 200,000 outstanding traffic warrants in Broward County. The attacks of 11 September both reinforced and exploded the fashionable myth that ...”

“... the depth of the greatest geological faultline in European civilisation. MacCulloch’s other major contention is demanding of the imaginative powers of his readers, many of whom will find themselves excluded from the mental, and especially the theological world of the 16th and 17th centuries. This was before all else a religious revolution, not to be ...”

“... restructure and reform the prisons in Iraq, including Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, both condemned by Major-General Antonio Taguba as the sites of ‘egregious acts and grave breaches of international law’. Or that Terry Stewart, the former director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, who began the now prohibited practice of ‘dog frights’ in the ...”

“... from Flanders to Damaraland in southern Africa, fetching, carrying and fighting, as the three major European powers mortgaged their empires on the Western Front. Germany was scandalised by the deployment of ‘barbarians’ in Europe, both at the time and later. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Hitler gave orders to destroy a statue of Mangin in the ...”

“... airport on 3 January, wasn’t the head of a terrorist organisation but a state official: a major-­general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the leader of its Quds Force, the unit re­spons­ible for external and clandestine oper­at­ions. He was a pivotal player in the reg­ion and, at times, its most brilliant military strategist. Iran’s ...”

“... He dissected aspects of French intellectual and political life in long review-essays in the major periodicals, notably La Revue des deux mondes. Two collections of these pieces, Essais de morale et de critique (1859), and then La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), established him as one of the most respected commentators on the ...”

“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

“... Speaking​ of his remarkable version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, John Ashbery said: ‘I myself try to be very literal, and I frequently use cognates even when they might sound a little strange in English.’ ‘Are there times when that doesn’t work?’ his interviewer, Claude Peck, asked. Ashbery replied without hesitation: ‘Oh sure, on every page, many times ...”

“... National Democratic Party, the RCD was a functional tool of the regime, so its abolition was a major achievement. (The old party HQ, a glass tower opposite the central bank and the ‘museum of money’, now contains a lesser ministry of state.) The sit-in at Kasbah Square was kept up until the prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, resigned on 27 ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...”