Search Results

“... that Jefferson had simply been wrong, a conviction made plain by Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens in his ‘cornerstone speech’ of 1861, which insisted that inequality, not equality, was a ‘law of nature’ and the foundation of social order. Another expression of this revised Myth of the Founding could be found in the Supreme ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... Veyne’s Le Pain et le Cirque,2 an analysis of civic giving in Classical Antiquity; the second Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights,3 a satirical and penetrating work about politics and everyday life in the Soviet Union. Veyne is, in my view, the greatest French historian now writing. I believe that his work will come to achieve the same status as ...”

“... more references in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, which has a paper by Alexander Broadie on Reid’s pre-Reformation Scottish precursors. In general, Reid stands to benefit from the current upturn in the fortunes of the history of philosophy, which comes after several decades in which philosophers have tended to behave as if their ...”

“... Light in August. In the months that followed, these were joined by a number of Rothkos and Alexander Calder’s Orange Fish. The curators had been instructed to purchase art from Impressionism to the present day, so they acquired Monet’s Giverny haystacks, village and garden scenes by Pissarro and Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec portraits, paintings by ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... did Chagall really belong ‘among the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image ...”

“... theatre’. Sometimes Prokofiev’s way of doing things fitted perfectly in the Soviet context. Peter and the Wolf, composed to a libretto featuring Soviet Young Pioneers written by Prokofiev himself, was one of the great successes of his early Moscow years; his music for Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky was ...”

“... convivial evenings at the Isobar, where guests ate bison tail and blue soup; the performance of Alexander Calder’s wire circus to an audience sitting on crates and drinking beer from a barrel; or nursery tea with Hepworth and the triplets, at which Mondrian licked the jam off his knife watched intently by three pairs of eyes. By 1938 London had begun to ...”

“... reports, and he has ferreted out applications from more than ninety of them, including Prince Peter Kropotkin, Sergei Stepniak, Vladimir Burtsev and Vera Zasulich. Lenin was more difficult to track down than some, as he first applied under his London pseudonym of Dr Jacob Richter and later under his own name of Ulyanov, registered by the BM as Oulianoff ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel ...”