Search Results

“... that Rab was still an appeaser. Dr Cosgrave points out that on this occasion ‘as in every major crisis when he disagreed’, he ‘made no serious public protest’. Macmillan waited and Butler was recruited to take charge, but while it was clear that there were many people on the backbenches who would oppose Butler were he to stand for prime ...”

“... might be a mistake. Just as 12 years for Ken would be too much, Boris is surely unthinkable in a major public office with real executive power. The alternative would be for all progressive voters to switch their first-preference vote to the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. In mayoral elections to date the Lib Dems have done by far the best among ...”

“... Other Shore’, and this is the stage on which his two protagonists, David Livingstone and John Kirk, play out their very different and not always complementary roles in the abolition of slavery. Liebowitz, a professor emeritus of medicine, writes with the enthusiasm of an accomplished academic who has found a new field of research after a career spent ...”

“... empire became even more influential on Elizabethan strategic thinking. According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it extraordinary distinction. In the period ...”

“... Garlake remarks, ‘designed less to inspire than to avoid giving offence’. Despite this, the major exhibitions which the Arts Council mounted at the Tate Gallery during the immediate postwar years greatly enlivened its near-moribund exhibition programme and aided London’s gradual takeover from Paris as a centre for the international art ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th ...”

“... preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets’. Eliot’s presence, though, still hovers over ...”

“... was at once a key document of the so-called ‘sociobiological revolution’ of the Seventies, a major student text, and a successful popular book. The Extended Phenotype (1981) was in some respects harder-going, but still it combined novel evolutionary ideas with accessibility to a general readership. Now we have The Blind Watchmaker. This, Dawkins’s best ...”

“... For they all express a rejection of the Western model of economic development propagated by the major aid agencies and financial institutions. These new movements harbour the suspicion that development on the Western model often creates poverty where it did not exist before, and produces patterns of economic activity in which the independence and integrity ...”

“... are no sodomites in Greene’s account, and the only coward, crank and sap-headed dilettante is John Sterling, the would-be mastermind of the whole affair. Charismatic, feckless and volatile, Sterling had dropped out of Cambridge, and by 1827, when he was 21, drifted to London, where he was dabbling in journalism and trying to sort out his doubts about ...”

“... more than Chernobyl, and a fall in the price of oil which turned the terms of trade in the only major Soviet commodity against him. Much of his difficulty, however, was the result of his own, and his Party’s, failure to grasp that there could be no middle way between Communism and capitalism. Communism may be qualified, as it had been in Hungary since the ...”

“... power whatever) is capable of doing a great deal of harm; and Unger himself acknowledges that any major project of social transformation may well turn out to be massively and brutally unsuccessful in practice. But it certainly does not follow that there is nothing important to be learnt from his urgent and idiosyncratic voice. Like most radical social ...”