Search Results

“... my friends, I mean my close friends. Then he made matters worse by saying he had had a talk with Michael (Heseltine). ‘He is formidable.’ ‘He’, pause, ‘is’, pause, ‘formidable’. I got him back to the station at four thirty, smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David ...”

“... So it’s pretty clear who the author has in mind when he equips his characters with uncanny powers of cultural precognition. Gibson’s career as a zeitgeist-wrangler got off to an impressive start when his science fiction novels – starting with Neuromancer (1984) – hammered out some sturdy templates for pop-cultural dystopianism. Ridley Scott’s ...”

“... by anthropophagy (or cannibalism), which seek to absorb individuals possessed by dangerous powers, and those characterised by anthropemy (from emein, ‘to vomit’), which seek to vomit them forth. Loudun is the image of the new anthropemic society. Later, Certeau would write: ‘On the reduced stage of possession a modification of ...”

“... 85 per cent of their trade in dollars.In Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020), Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis showed that the US functions as the world’s importer of last resort – absorbing the trade surpluses of Europe and China – and that the American working class pays the price. But they didn’t discuss the power that accrues to the US through ...”

“... Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him ...”

“... on 8 September 1951, specifies: ‘Except as otherwise provided in the present Treaty, the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers, other claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan and its nationals in the course of ...”

“... with impressive credentials: for example, the former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Lord Michael Carver, the former chief of the British Defence Staff; Bruce Blair, who has written extensively about nuclear command and control issues; Fred Iklé, who headed the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Ford; and Stansfield ...”

“... years, unless ... ‘seize land, finance and industry’ (without compensation?) – Emergency Powers Bill in one day, giving ‘all necessary powers’ ...   I make a violent – perhaps too violent – speech asking that this stream of oratorical ineptitudes should now cease ... It is the number of these gaffes ...”

“... the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you ...”

“... time. Socially, it will decide whether we live or die, and how we live or die. It holds decisive powers for good and evil. That is the situation in which the scientists find themselves. Snow was a bluff sort of realist: he was also an optimist, and his other theme is that the building of the great edifice of physical science is ‘one of the few human ...”

“... divorce. As he wrote in Love and Exile, ‘I had made up my mind a long time ago that the creative powers of literature lie not in the forced originality produced by variations of style and word machinations but in the countless situations life keeps creating, especially in the queer complications between man and woman. For the writer, they are potential ...”

“... things; who cannot be well at ease, while he sees evil hovering near him like a spectre; whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought, he to whom the universe seems infinite, and himself nothing; and who goes to a play as his best resource to shove off, to a second remove, the evils of life by a mock representation of them – this is the true ...”

“... tradition, Clair’s election [to the French Academy] signalled the virtual end of his creative powers’; ‘Godard was the one enfant terrible of the New Wave who remained terrible even when the industry slouched back to commercial normalcy in the mid-Sixties’ – and there are moments of real eloquence. The pioneer director Léonce Perret is said to be ...”

“... homestead’; ‘Paris had been a bust’; ‘Rilke knew he was headed for a showdown with his own powers of inspiration.’ We hear about the suicide of an uncle, ‘whom the child Rilke loved well, because he could not bear being still a captain at 51’. That sounds like Rilke, even if he sounds like a child of 51, but I think the ‘because’ must refer ...”

“... a military man, thinks: ‘this is the greatest danger, this point . . . where, in resisting the powers that form us, we allow them to gain control of all meaning; this is their moment of victory: it is in this way that they inflict their final and most terrible defeat.’ This is not the whole story, of course. There are less contaminated creatures of ...”