Search Results

“... Until relatively recently, criminal justice history was written not by professional historians but by the system’s practitioners – retired prison officials, civil servants, criminologists, reformers of various kinds. The widely shared conviction that the penal system was being shaken free of the irrationalities of the past and brought closer to the professional wisdom of the present tended to permeate even the best of these accounts and to impart an onwards-and-upwards structure to their narrative ...”

“... disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an explanation. And as David Garland points out in Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, on this and many other matters of criminal justice, the United States is not so much a single nation as a federation of 50 states, each of which has ...”

“... home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the night was over,’ he writes, ‘people jumped in the pool in their party clothes. I jumped in, too. I wanted to be a part of it. I thought to myself, this is how ...”

“... Less than two years after the publication of Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star (Leonardo Di Caprio) are about to make a film version of it, a remarkable achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one ...”

“... and an emblem of Sapphic modernity herself (with Jane Heap of the Little Review to Todd’s Madge Garland, her fashion editor at Vogue). Woolf called her Champco, and borrowed her clothes: ‘How odd, it comes into my mind, is Nessa & my jealousy of each other’s clothes! I feel her, when I put on my smart black fringed cape, anguished for a second: did I ...”

“... have taken it all so personally, since it’s difficult to find peers for White anywhere. David Marr’s excellent and sympathetic biography confirmed White’s singularity and perhaps even his greatness, but the recent Letters, astutely edited and accompanied by acerbic and timely interpolations, reveals the Nobel laureate as a man lagging well ...”

“... musicals. The characters don’t have to be dancers, or be ‘putting on a show’ as in the Garland/Rooney films: they just live as if on the brink of singing, they move as if about to break into dance, and dance as if it could be walking. I like to think this is what the young Truffaut had in mind when he slid across the floor of a Paris apartment to ...”

“... rump Workers’ Party still exists, but its electoral success is long over. Its former leader Sean Garland – a Border Campaign veteran who was the Official IRA’s chief of staff for many years – has spent the past few years under the threat of extradition to the US, accused of having been complicit in a North Korean dollar counterfeiting operation. (The ...”

“... device, particularly if the cover of the book it ostensibly contains has a savage Nicholas Garland illustration of a wild horseman wielding a bloody scimitar, surrounded by the decapitated victims of his havoc. If the poems of Manila Envelope are explosive, the manifesto makes its plea for them obliquely. Pawky, wry, epigrammatic and axe-grinding, it ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... think that they could get a good picture of my life from these pages; but it is not so.’ David Newsome, invited and challenged, has entered the labyrinth, drawing the rest of us with him into an implacable game initiated by the diarist. The mirrors and images multiply, with Newsome, the reviewer and the reader locked together in observation, and the ...”

“... seat of government in the Piazza della Signoria, he stopped in front of Michelangelo’s 15-foot David. He didn’t see in it a symbol of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre blanc, bien ouvre et tout dune ...”

“... times. Who is there to compare him with? Strube in his own day? Very limited. In our day, Trog and Garland? Trog draws brilliantly but is not very often funny; Garland can be quite sharp, but his drawing is both fussy and crude. Gerald Scarfe is essentially a caricaturist; Marc and Osbert Lancaster are purveyors of one-line ...”

“... push the court into the public eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the ...”

“... to bittersweet triumph, it becomes clear that the book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early ...”