Search Results

“... to forge a coalition government and deny all sides an illusory ‘victory’, Reagan and then Bush, with Pakistani connivance, ratcheted up support for the most murderous of theself-styled radical Islamists, to ensure that Moscow bled profusely and its Kabul ‘puppet’ suffered total defeat. In doing so, the US flouted not only its own self-interest ...”

“... 4 from tuning into my mind at lunchtime every day for the World at One. Reagan was long gone and Bush was in the White House. He didn’t send me any messages but he had the same initials as the General Belgrano. ‘GB’ was quite common on cars. The drivers would convey me to the president even though he was in Washington and I didn’t have a passport. I ...”

“... in gardening, cookery or design. The Boxes, nicknamed by Noël Coward ‘the Brontës of Shepherds Bush’, didn’t die at the Elephant but neither did they or their contemporaries blaze a trail. The scarcity of female directors and producers in the film industry is still marked and periodically lamented. The same is true of architecture. Cooke cites Zaha ...”

“... foci is ‘TB’s terrible sense of style, e.g. the awful pullover he wore on his walk with Bush and the dreadful creation he wore on the plane’. This becomes a running gag. ‘TB was wearing Nicole Farhi shoes, ludicrous-looking lilac-coloured pyjama-style trousers and a blue smock. After GB left, I said he looked like Austin Powers. He said you are ...”

“... the fearful conflicts of interest which surround our ecological predicament. Another such book was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Singer, like Passmore, devoted much of his time to clearing the ground – marshalling the relevant facts, surveying the range of existing attitudes, pointing out their confusions, and tracing the sources of trouble in the ...”

“... the Myth of the West carried with it intimations of violence. Slotkin does not beat about the bush: he calls Indian removal an example of ‘ethnic cleansing’.Slotkin is, of course, hardly the first to identify the presence of the frontier and westward expansion more generally as key dynamics in the evolution of American culture. Over a century ago, the ...”

“... Hillary Clinton presidency is so dreary. The dreariness begins with the real possibility that Jeb Bush will be her opponent, setting up another contest between two dynasties, one of which ‘exploited its vast wealth to obtain political power, while the other exploited its political power to obtain vast wealth’, as Glenn Greenwald recently put it. Nothing ...”

“... a few well-known and intelligent social democrats – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, Peter Jenkins and Polly Toynbee – but they were still destroyed by the electoral system and had to stave off obscurity by a political transplant, merging with the Liberals, an experiment that ended in disaster in 2015. Were they to try the same, the Blairites ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... of staff of the air force and helped plan Desert Storm. He was a Republican under George H.W. Bush, yet he went on to campaign for the Democratic senator Bob Kerrey and Barack Obama. He leaves drugs out of his list of rivulets because, I’d guess, he was above them. In close-up he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter ...”

“... of its effects.A few months earlier – in the remoteness of my small town on the fringes of the bush – I had thought, once again: enough’s enough. My doctor (his dusty downtown surgery darkened by eucalyptus trees) seemed disinclined to investigate, though happy to prescribe me stronger and stronger pain relief. Whatever he gave me (and however much ...”

“... incorporating the vast majority of the world’s population. The hope, as expressed by President Bush’s trade representative Bob Zoellick, was that China would become a responsible stakeholder in the global system. Twenty years later, it is the second largest national economy in the world. The US and China are deeply interconnected through trade and ...”

“... which is a sign of how vivid the early traumas remain. She likes both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, and resents Downing Street’s failure to make better use of her as an ‘asset’, but doesn’t notice that the two presidential wives have a clarity to their respective roles that she never seeks in her own. She eventually sees through Carole Caplin but ...”

“... idealists misled by a commitment to liberal democracy. Never mind that the honest idealists in the Bush camarilla were also Saddam Hussein’s major sponsors in the 1980s, or that Blair’s ideals stretched a few years later to selling his services as an adviser to other Middle Eastern and Central Asian dictatorships. The war’s erstwhile supporters remain ...”