Search Results

“... by Anglo-Jewry in business and at the polls has been a particularly sensitive issue. Indeed, Geoffrey Alderman notes the opposition and personal abuse which he suffered during the research and writing of his book on the Jewish vote in Britain from the leaders of Anglo-Jewry, who thought it best to ‘tell it not in ...”

“... have been used to avert world war. Possibly the same remark might be made today, for popular, even best-selling, books and plays are still being written about the protagonists. One of the first books about Mrs Simpson, as she still was, must have been Edwina H. Wilson’s Her name was Wallis Warfield, for it was published, in New York, in December 1936, before ...”

“... might restore it; and that ‘reading’ English was both the means to reform and perhaps its best result. This concern for reading was drummed in relentlessly, and supported early on by Mrs Leavis, whose Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) provided an official version of the rise and fall of the class-integrated audience. It also pioneered a direction ...”

“... In October 1889, Answers offered a pound a week for life to the reader who submitted the best estimate of the amount of gold held by the Bank of England on a given future day. Circulation rose enormously because of canny publicity, and because entrants had to find five witnesses for their guess. Harmsworth was the one who made real money from the ...”

“... if Kinnock had been electable – and betting that he wasn’t was easier money than ringing up Geoffrey Collier for a share tip – it is difficult to believe that a Labour administration would really like to see the business going elsewhere to the benefit of the competition. Statutory regulation by government department and higher rates of personal ...”

“... James Rusbridger’s great contribution is to raise British Intelligence to the element which best suits it: farce. At one level this book can be read as a series of Hilarious Tales. It describes, for instance, the elaborate plan by the CIA and MI6 in the early Fifties to tunnel into the Russian sector of Berlin, so that communications from there could be ...”

“... identification and partial assimilation, and on the other by accommodation and partial exclusion. Geoffrey Alderman is a member of the community he describes and his book can be read as a collective self-portrait – presented from an inward-looking, religiously Orthodox, politically conservative and rather philistine perspective. Modern British Jewry has ...”

“... Preface. Fortunately, a rival assessment of Bennett – the opening and longest essay in Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s engaging book of character sketches Absent Friends – is a good deal more forthright. A former history pupil of Bennett’s at New College, Wheatcroft writes with sympathy and understanding of the man who, even by the time he encountered ...”

“... Still, there was a good reason for the Celtic fixation of early scholars: two of the knottiest and best-known bits of fairy lore come from the Arthurian cycle. One concerns the ancestry of Arthur’s prophet, Merlin. In his 12th-century bestseller, Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth told the story of how ...”

“... that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.18 March. Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one of a growing number, I imagine, of those held on Zoom. I am unexpectedly on the verge of tears for someone who always put a smile on my face in art and life. I once told him that I was ...”

“... authors go so far back that one looks for Niall of the Nine Hostages on the next page. Perhaps the best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham ...”

“... Writing in his best haughty-provocative manner, T.S. Eliot described Coleridge as ‘one of those unhappy persons … of whom one might say that if they had not been poets, they might have made something of their lives, might even have had a career’. Although the syntax allows a little ambiguity about whether the unhappiness is independent of, or consequent on, being a poet, the obvious reading suggests a somewhat laboured sarcasm about the way the propensity for writing poetry can blight the exercise of other talents, talents that might have led to success in more orthodox careers ...”

“... saw themselves as part of a ‘sane and pragmatic’ political process. His attitude to truth is best described as dynamic. In the aftermath of the shooting, he recounted, his corporal of horse, Chudleigh, ‘a tough Bristolian’, had looked at him so solemnly ‘that I could not resist the temptation to say: “Kiss me, Chudleigh.”’ Having failed to ...”

“... heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points out, ‘became a model for the heavyweight ...”

“... ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966. Crossman’s predecessor, Kenneth Robinson, had appointed Howe to chair an inquiry into scandalous allegations, made in the News ...”