Search Results

“... heroes and psychical research have always been close. In his foreword to the two books, by Mackenzie and Blackmore, published to celebrate the Society’s centenary, Brian Inglis recalls the roll of honour among scientific converts: it includes Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. But of course what these two books also recall, and what is made even clearer ...”

“... at something he finds hard to bear. The brief biographies of 19th-century alienists through which Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey tell the story of the century’s dealings with the mad make it clear that Morison’s haunted expression could have been that of any of the seven ...”

“... that most of Susan Hill is in the Susan Hill collection at Eton College Library, and that Andrew Motion wrote a letter to E.M. Forster in ‘?1970’ which is under ‘restricted access’ at King’s College Cambridge. But as a writer, listed – however laconically – in the catalogue, I pondered its two volumes with welling unease. The first thing ...”

“... would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a number of breaches of the Official Secrets Act which included revealing the name of the first chief of MI6, Sir Mansfield Cumming. Mackenzie protested that Cumming had been dead for nine years, and the ...”

“... journalist of his generation.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ Murdoch said, ‘and who would that be?’ ‘Andrew Neil of the Economist’ was Burnet’s reply. What is our source for this extraordinary conversation? The aforesaid Andrew Neil, on page 25 of this book. Though he immediately describes Burnet’s assessment as ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... are overpriced. The first to do this were Manuel Asensio’s New York-based Asensio & Co and Andrew Left’s Citron Research, based in Los Angeles. (‘Citron’ is a joke, based on the US slang meaning of ‘lemon’, but Left is a deadly serious short seller.) Since 2008, Asensio and Left have been joined by around 15 other firms, including Block’s ...”

“... used a special purpose entity to buy generating capacity close to New York City. Enron’s CFO, Andrew Fastow, told the magazine: ‘We accessed $1.5 billion in capital but expanded the Enron balance-sheet by only $65 million.’ The magazine seems to have approved, awarding Fastow its 1999 CFO Excellence Award for Capital Structure Management. CFO may not ...”

“... preferred image of itself. The figure made its first, understated appearance in March 2010, when Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, included it in a talk in Hong Kong, then reappeared later that year in a chart buried at the back of the December issue of the Bank’s Financial Stability Report. The figure was the size of ...”

“... of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more horrified – felt, indeed, much more betrayed – by the fact that the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight ...”

“... in the New Club in Edinburgh, and heard, one day, that the house was for sale. Colin Hercules Mackenzie, who sold the house to the Macfies, was the international marketing director for J. and P. Coats yarn company; he was an old Etonian, a student of John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge and a lieutenant in the Scots Guards, who had lost a leg at the ...”

“... Ant, went mad for a time, or took up heroin, as Boy George did; they killed themselves, like Billy Mackenzie of the Associates, or just died too young of too much everything, like George Michael. Culture Club’s fourth album, released in 1986, was called From Luxury to Heartache. Perhaps it was always built into the programme, part of the sequencer: have all ...”

“... to Henry James, might be seen ‘lagging in the dusty rear’ of Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie), of another banned book, and perhaps also of a third unpublishable one. Yet he was a genius, not only in his own eyes but in the opinion of many discriminating people, not, unfortunately, publishers. For us, the justification of his and their view is ...”

“... and the combination of so many computers and all that air conditioning makes for a lot of noise. Andrew Blum, author of a fine book on the physical reality of the internet, describes visiting a data centre as ‘like stepping into a machine … as loud as a rushing highway’.2 There are four main share-trading data centres in the US. The New York Stock ...”

“... and ‘if there is a certain soap story-line, then yes we do spin stories off it.’ Kelvin MacKenzie spotted in particular the potential for mutual promotion by the Sun and EastEnders, which blossomed first with an exclusive revelation that the actor who plays Dirty Den had a real-life murder conviction, and continued with SEARCH FOR REAL LIFE DIRTY ...”