Search Results

“... for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are studying it carefully. They can legitimately enjoy the more egregious mistakes made by the Tories since 1979, but they should be sparing with their scorn. They should remember the errors of previous administrations; and be thankful they did not win ...”

“... regimes who keep both radical Islamists and liberal democrats at bay. When George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq they promoted the idea that the West was facing a worldwide jihadi threat led by al-Qaida. The global war on terror was against a single enemy: radical Islam. At first, each manifestation of that threat was attacked with massive ...”

“... did, as well as more recent experimenters such as Hopkins, John Berryman or the sub-Prynnean Tony Lopez. Donne and Hopkins used sonnets as vehicles for religious anguish because it’s so easy to suggest that they’re buckling under pressure, that the spirit will not run true to the form, or to God. The sonnet has a structure that invites mild ...”

“... though, is selective, teleological and dependent on long-standing myths. There is the log cabin to White House myth, transmuted in this case to Grantham-corner-shop-to-Downing-Street. But more ancient, less secular narratives have been brought into play as well, subliminal themes of sin, suffering and redemption, of long-awaited messiahs and of betrayals with ...”

“... plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... simply (or simplistically), black writers probably want to talk about the same sorts of things as white writers – love, loss, desire, power, their relationships with their personal, social and political communities, with their environment, with other texts. Each writer, whether white or black, will draw on a varying ...”

“... used to diminish powerful Black women. ‘I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp, white background,’ Zora Neale Hurston said. Gavin, an experienced biographer who has written books on Chet Baker, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee, as well as on ‘the golden age of New York cabaret’, should exercise greater care. (Incidentally, no context is given ...”

“... towards radical conservatism, Carlylism can also be discerned at work beneath the surface of Tony Blair’s Christian Socialism, a line which descends via F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Blair contrives to put an upbeat spin on his ‘muscular Christianity’ (‘tough’ is his favoured term) but the essence of Carlylism is gloom, its energy, as ...”

“... those who were members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Once the MCP’s forces began killing white planters, the British declared an emergency. Under regulations imposed by the high commissioner, Henry Gurney, British soldiers and police forces held tens of thousands of suspects without trial, burned homes, shot people indiscriminately and deported as ...”

“... contract at every prancing step. Out of their pointed faces, out of their open mouths, over their white teeth, a flat but serpentine tongue lolls, laps, lets drop its spittle. All this is ghostly or demonic enough, but to it must be added the effect of their eyes, their swept-back ears, their polished pelts. Shining grey, shining black, brindle, fawn, ...”

“... was 18 years old.’ Later in the day, Houston encounters a ‘crew-cut man in his forties with a white towel hitched under his belly and a cigarette clamped between his front teeth’. This is Colonel Sands, a messianic CIA officer and veteran of the Second World War, who drinks too much and takes an unusual and obsessive interest in the tunnels that ...”

“... The claims were first published in 2012, in an Elephant Action League report called ‘Africa’s White Gold of Jihad: al-Shabaab and Conflict Ivory’, and gained traction after the attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013, in which 62 people died.By 2015, the report’s central claims had been debunked as a gross exaggeration of the ...”

“... who end up abroad in flight from their creditors, the appalling shits who go off to do white mischief in the Kenyan highlands, the paranoid eccentrics who embrace ridiculous or distasteful political crusades, the pompous proconsuls who deceive themselves into mistaking the trappings for the power, and the deference-hungry nonentities who clutch at ...”

“... he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”