Search Results

“... which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame and her obsession with ...”

“... the son of the author of Wind in the Willows?A. A nickname: Mouse.Tell the Bede story to Maggie Smith, who recalls some lines she had to sing in revue:Oh, I am the Venerable BedeI can scarcely write and just about read.18 February. Listening to the last movement of Elgar’s First Symphony I’m put in mind of some huge submerged mass coming to the ...”

“... that money – especially self-creating money, or capital – corresponds to God, with Adam Smith as patriarch and classical political economy as the Bible. Rather like Rorty, he had a zeal for saving his fellow leftists from absolutist delusions: that is why he exhorted them to treat the mystery of capital rather as atheists treat the mystery of ...”

“... and blankets for Spain; Patrick Hamilton deserted satirical realism for dystopia and allegory; Stephen Spender meandered Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris Lessing, so ...”

“... by gain. Maybe it’s to be expected, then, that the Marx celebrated by Roubini and his coauthor Stephen Mihm, in a résumé of earlier theorists of crisis, appears as a mere herald of continual disruption rather than as an economist who located at the heart of such crises the existence of bourgeois society as such, or the social cleavage between ...”

“... of Our Ladye Star of the Sea Church was taken to the Greenwich site by the tunnel manager, Rob Smith. There is a photograph of the officiating priest, black clad, warm scarf, arms spread wide, mouth agape, as if measuring the scale of the biblical flood that would soon be pouring downriver. Michael Rawson, sub-dean and canon pastor of Southwark ...”

“... goings-on is a direct result of that unforgettable, unforgivable, life-shattering Tuesday morning. Stephen Holmes New York Islam was a medieval religion that had managed to stumble on into the 20th century. This was the view held in the 1950s by academic pundits in the West, such as Alfred Guillaume and Wilfred Cantwell ...”

“... despite being silenced on the radio and disappeared from the shelves in Woolworth’s and W.H. Smith. But as two more hit singles followed – the promo video for ‘Pretty Vacant’ aired on Top of the Pops – and their well-produced, conventionally powerful first album, Never Mind the Bollocks, sold well too, the Sex Pistols started to resemble a ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan could feel hemmed in. He was Glaswegian in that ...”

“... It’s all because they wouldn’t let me play football.Oh dear. You sound like that poem by Stephen Spender, telling the world how scared he was of the rough boys who threw stones.Please don’t. I’d better shut up.You could have been a contender. My point is you did become a contender.In a way, yes. I’m still pretty good at football, except I’m a ...”

“... in popular culture today. At the end of his foreword to the first Transgender Studies Reader, Stephen Whittle lists as one of the new possibilities for trans people opened up by critical thought the right to claim a ‘unique position of suffering’. But, as with all political movements, and especially any grounded in identity politics, there is always a ...”

“... Quite simply it caused nearly all of the 72 deaths. ‘There’s a moment,’ the fire expert Stephen Mackenzie told me, ‘when the tactics have to move from “remain in place” to “assisted evacuation”.’ It had been obvious from very early on, even to spectators on the ground, that the fire at Grenfell Tower was not going to be put out, that it ...”