Search Results

“... was my key writer when I came to edit Isis. I doubt if any Oxford undergraduate – and I include Peter Fleming and Kenneth Tynan – has written so wide-ranging, witty and intelligent a group of pieces over such a short period as Jeremy wrote for Isis that summer. They always turned up on time, perfectly typed and at the right length. Their subjects included ...”

“... Ivan the Terrible had distributed land to his favourites (much to Stalin’s later approval); Peter the Great, by contrast, had abolished the private ownership of land; Catherine the Great had reintroduced it. At this point Linklater gets a little entangled in his own outline. He began with a more or less familiar Whiggish, Marxish version, in which ...”

“... and dissidents, partly thanks to the social isolation both groups suffered in Moscow. The Washington Post’s correspondent Peter Osnos would break ranks in 1977 and criticise the Western press for its uncritical support of the dissidents and inflation of their significance. But the courting of Western support never ...”

“... and Edwardians. But Wells adds that ‘there would be no killing, no lethal chambers’. Peter Morton in The Vital Science (1984) shows how Wells, following such precursors as Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen, soon became the champion of a ‘social reformist eugenics’, looking to female emancipation, birth control and the Welfare State to ...”

“... audiences went to see it in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. In Washington it was seen by Eleanor Roosevelt, who praised it in her newspaper column.We Will Never Die led Hecht to Zionism, or at least to one wing of it. The movement had split in the early 1920s, less than four years after the Balfour Declaration, when ...”

“... is light years on the go/From far away and takes light years arriving.’ Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, makes the striking claim that Murray had the poorest background of any English poet since Keats. Enough to bend anyone not double – which is a misnomer really – but half. One might as well go for an astronaut. And yet Heaney is ...”

“... House. He also played his part, recorded for admiring posterity by Norman Mailer, in the March on Washington, and was active in other anti-war demonstrations. He exerted himself for Eugene McCarthy in his presidential campaign, and enjoyed it without expecting to have much effect on the result. His poems are strongly affected by contemporary history as well ...”

“... There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a patronising amateur. ‘Socially,’ Odom said, ‘I no longer find the British amusing, merely a pain in the ass.’ Kissinger, cross with Edward Heath, actually suspended intelligence ...”

“... conference next month or could have any immediate effect is ridiculous. Brown’s haring off to Washington to spread the good news is alarmingly reminiscent of Blair’s trip after 9/11 – except that Blair was talking to a Republican America eager to hear what he had to say, whereas Brown is talking to a Democratic America that cares very little. The ...”

“... Sir​ Nicholas Henderson was British ambassador almost everywhere that mattered – Bonn, Paris, Washington. He met all the great personalities of the second half of the 20th century. Yet in conversation he reverted, time and again, to the few years he spent in his twenties as assistant private secretary to Ernest Bevin ...”

“... Cameron, a PR confection, insolent to the bulk of his own people while repulsively servile to Washington and often to Beijing. Clegg barely needs a description. His party will suffer in the next election and we might soon be deprived of his presence. All are flanked on the right by Ukip, whose policies each tries to pander to in its own ...”

“... of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every historian operates with a theory of human nature, every historian is inescapably an amateur psychologist. The choice is not whether to use psychology or not, but whether to borrow the insights of professional ...”

“... that Cardoen was ‘a responsible recipient of US products’. When Theberge returned to Washington he worked for a Cardoen subsidiary, and was promptly recruited by Casey as a member of the CIA’s Senior Review Panel. Thus, as Alan Friedman wryly comments, he was a ‘paid employee of both the CIA and Carlos Cardoen. It was a comfortable closing of ...”

“... wonder is that it hasn’t already been filmed, with Emma Thompson as the narrator and Denzel Washington in the title-role). Meanwhile, Behn’s plays have attracted stars as expensive as Jeremy Irons and Christopher Reeve, and she herself, now conscripted to the cause of postcolonialism as well as that of feminism, has been the subject of a Canadian play ...”

“... puzzling about this, I received a phone call from Tony Lanyi, one-time Harvard room-mate, now a Washington economist, and a close friend. He had called to persuade me to go, if that was needed. He said he had just been back to a class reunion at his high school in Oberlin, Ohio. Working-class and college graduate, it had been quite a mix, though he guessed ...”