Search Results

“... was a nation that had failed to find itself, its national myths usurped by the military and, as Jimmy Burns points out, swept up into Juan Peron’s vision of ‘a country which is formed by generals, liberated by generals, led by generals and today claimed by generals’. The militarisation of Argentine society reached its apogee in the Seventies. A ...”

“... accused of being ultra-conservative.’ A Jesuit who lived under Bergoglio’s rule is quoted by Jimmy Burns in Francis: Pope of Good Promise (2015): ‘He exercised his authority with an iron fist as if he was the sole interpreter of St Ignatius Loyola.’When Jesuit priests visited poor areas, Bergoglio encouraged them to talk about religion rather ...”

“... the Civil War,’ she said. ‘But I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’s famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War.’Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a sympathetic ...”

“... to limn his lightly disingenuous account with mock-Nathanael West lines goes awry (‘The fact is, Jimmy, I am no longer completely sure who I am’). Working for director ‘Ike Welper’ – a man with ‘the imagination of a tub of coleslaw’, ‘the creative gift of a cockroach’, ‘the emotional age of a nine-year-old schoolboy’ and ‘the power to ...”

“... the castle) and a Princes Street (with no prince); even in the 1960s, the statue of Robert Burns in the middle of the main street was surrounded by Highland dancers every Friday night. The Scottishness of Mackay’s Dunedin is more a matter of moral style than of civic life, and her New Zealand a place of lush temptations and hazards – of bubbling ...”

“... had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at ...”

“... years. Many of the biggest British acts of the early 1980s were fronted by gay men, Steve Strange, Jimmy Somerville, Pete Burns, Boy George, Leee John, Morrissey, Billy Mackenzie, Holly Johnson and Marc Almond among them.Not since the Supremes and Diana Ross had a pop group produced a lead singer so clearly destined for solo ...”

“... The Manchester of the 1950s and 1960s flashes by too fast. There are a pair of droll stories about Jimmy Savile, the city’s first big DJ. When his lunchtime sessions at the Plaza, a club in the city centre, began to empty the neighbouring schools and colleges on weekdays, he prepared a stock answer for complaining headteachers. ‘You’ve had it too easy ...”

“... producer. He is a reporter who became a full-time writer of books: Homicide (1991) and, with Ed Burns, The Corner (1997), both of which were turned into successful TV series. Both concern drugs and death in Baltimore; Simon has said that ‘what drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has.’ The Wire is different, though: more ambitious, more ...”

“... the back of the book records such key events as (May 1935) ‘HR beaten up visiting dockworkers; burns MSS’ and (October 1946) ‘Burns MSS; murders puppy’. He was born in 1906 in Tysmenitz: now in Ukraine, it was a Polish town until 1772 when it was absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth’s father, Chaim, had ...”

“... found wrong with Mrs McCorquodale when she’d been arrested, old fractures, new cigarette burns and one of her teeth loose. Another lawyer then jumps up and says, Were other people involved? And she said, ‘No,’ and he said he wouldn’t pursue that at this stage. The upshot is she was sent for trial. I said to Henry: ‘Does that mean they’ll ...”

“... no nuclear showdown at the OK Corral: but there also would have been no Test Ban Treaty, no war on Jimmy Hoffa, no Civil Rights Act, no Alliance for Progress, no Manpower Development and Training Act, no rising hope in the young that this was a country which also belonged to them. Americans have always asked of their Presidents more than their liberties could ...”

“... do), it’s just that any contagion of piety eventually provokes one to laughter. A stray candle burns the cloth on a holy altar and, the next minute, everyone is wailing in a medieval way about faith and trust. Blair’s book is a masterpiece of such overstatement: you get the impression he will go to any lengths to avoid simply saying: ‘I was stupid. I ...”

“... find out which gender of “no-good” it was.’ Porter, who wrote so well for low comedians like Jimmy Durante and Bert Lahr, has an ear for the sludge of American speech, and enjoys retailing it to friends. At a party for Douglas Fairbanks Jr, he recounts Samuel Goldwyn’s overheard malapropism: ‘Since the last time I saw you, we’ve passed a lot of ...”

“... been delighted that one of his admirers, Sheena Wellington, stole the show with her rendition of Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’. Neat is a Cornish-born art historian, beekeeper and film-maker who moved to Scotland in the late 1960s. Between 1999 and 2002 he published five highly regarded oral histories of traditional Highland life and ...”