Search Results

“... Clifford was looking for a cause – especially if it had a few million dollars attached to it. Adams and Frantz describe in detail one deal in which Clifford and his partner Robert Altman, well-known in Washington social circles since he was married to Wonderwoman, bought and sold shares through BCCI and ended up with $9.8m in their pockets. Kerry reveals ...”

“... country sensible discussion of terrorism is still possible. Charles Townshend, Paul Wilkinson and James Adams are immune to the hysteria that has afflicted Reagan’s America. Performing a miracle of compression, Mr Townshend tells the story of British ‘counter-insurgency’ in Ireland, the Middle East, India, Malaya, South Africa and Kenya. The author ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert ...”

“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to the ...”

“... Hamlet marks the point of transition to the new dynamics of the reign of James. As the Prince increasingly uses the terms employed by artisans and the lower orders, he seems to commit himself to a language learned from the politically voiceless, and thus to become their mouthpiece. To the Court this signifies madness.Madness of a ...”

“... Ewall, predicts 67 per cent Yes and bets me a fiver. He reminds me that in the early Sixties Gerry Adams worked behind the bar here. No one I can hear is talking about the referendum. Mind you, Ewall says, releasing the Balcombe Street Gang and Michael Stone, that was a mistake. Typical colonialism. They don’t understand the people here. Yes, I say, they ...”

“... or looking round the sides of a maybe extinct volcano. I’m meditating on this when there’s a ring at the door. David goes to answer it and returns with a tall grey-haired man in his later fifties whom I’ve never met before but whose face is almost familiar. ‘Tom, meet the Reverend William Haslett,’ he says. It isn’t one of his jokes. But the ...”

“... analysis of works she admired: ‘What more are you going to say of a great thing [in this case, Ring Lardner’s collected stories] than that it is great?’ Instead, she preferred what Sloane Crosley calls the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of Elinor Glyn, Emily Post and Winnie the Pooh, at whose insistent whimsy ‘Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up’. The main draw was ...”

“... the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and ...”

“... and independence, and complexly shadows the utopian vision of a ‘supple and turbulent’ ring of men singing a secular hymn to the sun in the poem’s previous stanza. One of the most powerful experiences of Stevens’s early manhood was a seven-week camping and hunting holiday in the Canadian Rockies in the summer of 1903, in the company of his ...”

“... in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into ...”

“... between a Britain of eccentric abolitionists and an America of tyrannical slaveholders doesn’t ring true. Granville Sharp was an enthusiastic member of an Atlantic movement against slavery, corresponding avidly with Quakers such as Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia, and drawing inspiration from the progress made by American campaigners. Schama notes that ...”

“... cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a ...”