Search Results

“... and the development of the steam engine by James Watt. There were also the achievements of James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire labourer, who, after surveying Newfoundland between 1763 and 1767, made three voyages to the Pacific, charting the coasts of New Zealand, the east coast of Australia and the west coast of North America. ...”

“... the tale, one of the most poignant moments in the whole of literature in Gaelic:Moling ordered his cook to leave aside some of each day’s milking for Sweeney’s supper. This cook’s name was Muirghil and she was married to a swineherd of Moling’s called Mongan. Anyhow, Sweeney’s supper was like this: she would sink ...”

“... has not attracted major politicians. Labour heavyweights, such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, stayed in London; even Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, decided after a term in the Scottish Parliament that he preferred to abandon Edinburgh for the clubbability of Westminster. More significantly, after only a year as first minister of the devolved ...”

“... to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to ...”

“... Jorgensen’s archive begins to sound like the notorious ‘Black Books’ compiled by Edward Cook for Sir George Arthur’s proto-totalitarian penal regime. ‘By 1830,’ Hughes says, ‘Van Diemen’s Land had the most thorough files on its inhabitants, bond and free, of any community in the world.’ The Commandant’s train station has a precedent in ...”

“... mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That Adam Ferguson did less original ...”

“... devilish, the incarnation of cruel despotism. No publicist was more prominent, or bizarre, than David Urquhart, the crackpot Scottish agitator who sat for some years in Parliament. He developed a passion for all things Turkish (including Turkish baths, which he introduced to London), denounced Russia in apocalyptic terms, and maintained that Palmerston was ...”

“... Lessing’s was more benign, boundaried and bountiful. ‘She is a fabulous improvisational cook, dashing from her writing table to the kitchen to please her man, producing stews and home-baked bread on demand … What she isn’t, is a natural nurse,’ he writes. ‘If I moan and groan, fall over and blank out, race around the house ...”

“... antiquities at Sotheby’s and head of modern painting. When Magnus Linklater took over as editor, David Sylvester, my neighbour and great friend, who had been art adviser, offered his resignation. So suddenly there wasn’t an art adviser. Bruce was at a terribly low ebb. He’d been working for ages on the book which eventually came out as The Songlines. He ...”

“... circles for his own tripartite schema of current political practices. He had the ear of Robin Cook and is now said to have the ear of Jack Straw (though Tony Blair, typically, blows hot and cold). In The Post-Modern State and the World Order, Cooper divides the world up into pre-modern, modern and post-modern states. Pre-modern states attempt, and for the ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... women. Arbus threw herself more or less serially but with equal passion into being a wife, a good cook and hostess, a mother, a sexual radical, a career-woman and an artist. She exhibited striking alternations between elegance and scruffiness, between cooking elaborate meals, serving chilli every night and offering inedible mixtures of unidentifiable ...”

“... Germany of today. One of them, the beguiling exhibition at the British Museum curated by Barrie Cook, displays objects of many kinds, from the wooden sculptures made in the late 15th century by Tilman Riemenschneider to the metallic icon of the Volkswagen Beetle, in order to address the question of Germany’s fragmented sense of itself across the ages. The ...”

“... supporting British liberty and strength. Now English people who notice it wonder what it was for. David Cameron says he will fight to prevent the break-up of Britain ‘with every single fibre’. But why? When Salmond rang him up after the election and read out a shopping list of demands, Cameron seems to have been oddly silent. Many London commentators made ...”

“... guards all the time,’ she told a reporter from Reuters. ‘Often my relatives or I have to cook for them, my sister-in-law has to make their beds. This is a bit annoying … It gets really chaotic when I have to travel, because I use public transport and the guards are following me in an air-conditioned car.’ Though she seemed unimpressed by the sole ...”