Search Results

“... didn’t. The building was rejected by the planning inspector, but the rejection was overruled by John Prescott, then ‘first secretary of state’, on the basis that it was part of an existing ‘cluster’ of tall buildings. That wasn’t true, but the relevant authorities set about making it true in retrospect, by giving planning permission to a number of ...”

“... San Suu Kyi; it might have been more interesting to denounce any or all of these. The title echoes John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, but that book did include some men by no means universally admired: George Norris, who attacked the Wilson administration’s infringement of neutrality during the Great War, or Robert Taft, who criticised the Nuremberg ...”

“... to enter his enclosure, and slides around in his own darkness. Exactly 146 interviews later, John le Carré, our premier narrative spook-meister, exhibits, by his own admission, that knack whereby the memory fails and the lie takes over. There is something in his tone that advises us not to believe him too much. The interview took place in 1997, more ...”

“... of liberty, if compared with that which prevails in the other three divisions of the world,’ Joseph Addison wrote in 1712; and if England had not been in at least some way ahead of nearly all the rest of Europe, this long outpouring of inspired thoughts on right and wrong would have been impossible. All the same, freedom of thought was always under ...”

“... The pleasures of the flesh reflect the will of Allah.Bouhdiba’s second example is the story of Joseph’s temptation. The Old Testament version puts the blame entirely on the wife of the rich merchant Potiphar, who tries to seduce Joseph. He resists, and the scorned woman uses the shirt she has torn off him to accuse him ...”

“... pastime? Yet it began as a serious scientific hypothesis. Its founder, the German anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), argued that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that particular parts of the brain function as the organs of particular mental faculties. He assumed that there are distinct intellectual powers for language, music, mathematics and ...”

“... reshuffle he did not hesitate to replace his brother by his cousin at the Board of Trade. When Joseph Chamberlain and the Duke of Devonshire both resigned, Balfour promoted their sons, Austen Chamberlain and Victor Cavendish. There was even a romantic tinge to patronage. The two great loves of Balfour’s life were May Lyttelton, whose early death had ...”

“... died in 1638, possessed by Dog’s Dick and Leviathan. Among those possessed was Father Jean-Joseph Surin, a Jesuit mystic who had arrived in Loudun in December 1634, and who, instead of participating in the exorcisms, had prayed with the leader of the possessed nuns, the prioress, Sister Jeanne; he had even prayed that her demons would leave her and ...”

“... remove all traces of taste, but rather over-spicing it. We learn, too, about the French traveller Joseph Fiévée, who thought English women hypocritical for not receiving visitors in their bedrooms in the name of modesty, while rushing to their windows without shame to watch half-naked boxers. And there is Lord Castlereagh’s reply to Mme de Staël’s ...”

“... a handful of elderly men and women who walked, solitary more often than not, with a portrait of Joseph Stalin on a pole or clasped like an icon to their chests. There was the Andreyevsky (St Andrew’s) flag and the black, yellow and white flag, a reassertion of the right to rule of Imperial Russia. By their banners and signs, these demonstrators – about ...”

“... Cultural glasnost has yet to allow the public to read the work of living émigré writers such as Joseph Brodsky or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Moreover, widening the boundaries of discussion in order to overcome resistance to change is a high-risk strategy. It is bound to increase fears that glasnost may go too far and threaten the system’s stability, while ...”

“... and more informed attention than it is used to getting – an outstanding chapter is that by Joseph Duggan on ‘The Epic’. This has a lot to do with the affinity with the Middle Ages so patently felt by the theoretically-minded, who enjoy making close acquaintance with a literary age in which the supposedly god-given categories of work, genre and ...”

“... not long before we discover that the Fullers could be as sharp over money as Will Piper. Next June Joseph Fuller was entrusted by Turner with the task of beating down a man who wanted nine guineas for a horse, but Joseph bought the animal himself, and barefacedly informed Turner that the price was now £11. Turner kept his ...”

“... intake of meat. (While preparing for Christ’s return Mrs White’s protégé, the nutritionist John Kellogg, developed a special vegetarian diet of processed corn, transforming Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Seventh-Day Adventists had their headquarters, into the Breakfast Food Capital of the World.) Like Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism is now a ...”

“... Nathaniel Harman, and Katherine Chamberlain, first cousin of Neville and niece of the great Joseph. In later life Elizabeth was told that her father, a serious citizen, never made love the night before a cataract operation. His courtship had been all but shattered by a religious tug-of-war, which led to a nervous breakdown: he clung to the mysteries of ...”