Search Results

“... In the summer​ of 2005 London was chosen to host the 2012 Olympics and West Ham United were celebrating their return to the Premier League after a two-season absence. Few around the club at that time would have welcomed the prospect of leaving the Boleyn Ground, where they had played since 1904, for a new stadium in Stratford, and no one in the office of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, imagined they were constructing an Olympic stadium that a football club could inherit when the games were over ...”

“... If​ the real point of the European Union is to achieve an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, the British have never seriously wanted a place in it. If we follow the logic, Brexit makes the EU a more viable political entity. But the EU has always been about much more than gradual European political unification. Currently, it is set up in a manner intended to enable it to manage the varying problems of its member states and to contain Germany ...”

“... oil deals for their countries; sometimes gradually, through a series of unintended consequences.Helen Thompson’s​ Disorder begins with an intuition: that the intertwining of oil and monetary policy lay behind two of the most dramatic events in recent Anglo-American politics: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Brexit was a result of ‘the ...”

“... the BBC secured the licence fee – frozen at the current level – for the next six years. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, told me in June that the Foreign Office’s continuing control is ‘a fine constitutional point’ which can be addressed in the next charter renewal – no more threatening, he believes, than the potential the government ...”

“... as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a selection from further reminiscences by Helen and her daughter Myfanwy, and six letters from Frost to Thomas. ...”

“... In the summer of​ 1941, the American reporter Dorothy Thompson flew to London via neutral Lisbon. She was met by her British editor, J.W. Drawbell of the Sunday Chronicle, who had ‘looked in vain for someone in authority, some worthy figure representing England’ to meet her off the plane – the archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps ...”

“... lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it. Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it ‘says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.’ Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of ...”

“... by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976. Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963; between those dates he lived a long and harrowing life, the general details of which have become well known. They include the early death of his ...”

“... Johnson and Thatcher could not be more different. She was a Christian politician whereas he is, as Helen Thompson has pointed out, fundamentally pagan. Thatcher believed she was governing an essentially Christian country, which was doubtful even then and certainly would not be true today. She did things it is impossible to imagine Johnson doing. For ...”

“... brought about the desired upsurge. An older generation of Marxists (led by the unvanquished E.P. Thompson) have counter-attacked with the ‘poverty of theory’ and continued to assert the validity of a traditional British socialist heritage going back at least to the 17th century. All this is given full play in Caute’s narrative. Richard Stern is a young ...”

“... we would sink into a fundamentalist nightmare where verbal insult is injury, punishable as crime. Helen Benedict’s Virgin and Vamp and Gregory Matoesian’s Reproducing Rape are part of this assault: they seek to combat rape by reforming the way it is described. Although Benedict’s book is a journalist’s critique of rape coverage in the press and ...”

“... therefore, that contributors to the first wave of ‘history from below’, including E.P. Thompson, used working-class memoirs so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By ...”

“... on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about valuable ...”

“... Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at Christmas. Andrew Davies symbolised the great success of 1990s BBC drama: the reinvention of the classic serial, whose high points (including Davies’s Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch) were produced under the wing of Michael ...”

“... through a fraction of a degree and the centre of the arch drops a millimetre or so. Sinclair Thompson, the engineer who surveyed the church, takes the long view. If movement is ancient, very gradual and not accelerating, heroic measures – tie bars, underpinning – are not even considered. The good news is that St George’s is remarkably sound. It was ...”