Search Results

“... The third and final volume of the Webb diaries, which covers the period 1905 to 1924, is appropriately subtitled ‘The Power to Alter Things’. Hitherto Beatrice had been mainly the stay-at-home book-writer and social entertainer, while Sidney pursued his activities in the London County Council as well as in the London School of Economics which the Webbs had themselves founded ...”

“... The final entry in Volume One of this diary, dated 23 July 1892, left Beatrice safely married to her Sidney, but lamenting that, according to current convention, as ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’ she would lose both her names. The next entry is dated 16 August and is divided between a brief reference to two delightful days of ‘real honeymoon in the Wicklow Hills’ and interviews with trade-unionists in Glasgow and elsewhere relevant to the History of Trade Unionism, which was to be their first joint book ...”

“... Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual’. For this she suffered a strong sense of guilt, as she earnestly believed that ‘whatever my mother might be, it ought not to make the slightest difference to my feelings and behaviour towards her ...”

“... the only reading-matter was a medical textbook and the first volume of what was to become Compton Mackenzie’s quadrilogy, The East, West, South and North Winds of Love. I embarked on it with hope and confidence, but after only a few pages had to give up and turn for entertainment to the medical book. Considering myself a mature and experienced reader, I was ...”

“... during the election campaign an unnamed cabinet minister telephoned the editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, to offer the names and phone numbers of several women who, he claimed, had had affairs with Paddy Ashdown. Mr Mackenzie made the allegation off-the-cuff in a BBC radio interview about the rights and wrongs of the ...”

“... and atmosphere are still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to ...”

“... made him famous. He quickly came to command large advances. Here’s a sample – taken from Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie’s Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973) – of his subsequent dealings with publishers, in this case from 1899 to 1901: ‘For When the Sleeper Wakes he had £700 for the serial rights and ...”

“... West, in H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life, is ironical about Wells’s edifying account (followed by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie) of his ‘hard decision’ to leave the house he had built for himself in France. The truth, says West, is that Odette Keun had chucked him out. (Keun, it does strike one, was a real ...”

“... centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have browsed them for background material, notably Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie in their book The Fabians. But it has taken until now for any publisher to be persuaded that a public wider than that of economic historians has been waiting to learn what Shaw paid for boot dubbing ...”

“... it wasn’t long before he was replaced by the private-school educated, wannabe barrow-boy Kelvin MacKenzie.) Now that Murdoch has 131 other media enterprises to take care of, his personal impact must be negligible, but the old Murdochian personality of the paper remains. To some extent its self-proclaimed ‘radical’ championing of ‘the people’ against ...”

“... The ‘craze’ was a short one, coinciding with the late wave of the general European scare. Norman Cohn has established that the existence of a witch scare in the early 14th century is an invention of historians. Witchcraft, in theory and in suppression, was a growth at the end of the 14th century, died down in the early 16th century to return in the ...”

“... with churning desire. One double-click of a computer mouse, and you’re on Canada’s cascading Mackenzie River, or New Zealand’s winding Hope River, or the deep aquamarine pools of the Big Blackfoot River in Montana. The sensational locations vary, but the thrill remains the same. The piquant tension of the pick-up. (‘C’mon, baby.’) Then, the ...”

“... a similar about-face in Paris. Then there are the many American intellectuals who followed Norman Podhoretz from the ranks of the liberal Left into reactionary self-bowdlerisation. For them American power is sacrosanct. In the 1960s V.S. Naipaul began, disquietingly, to systematise the revisionist view of empire. A disciple and wilful misreader of ...”

“... did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In ...”

“... now less of a universal threat than it was between the 1950s and the 1980s. Some years back Donald MacKenzie argued in the LRB that – contrary to so many earlier previsions – nuclear weapons had been in effect ‘disinvented’ by the closure of the Cold War, and the colossal, escalating investment in both material and human resources needed to make them ...”