Search Results

“... reaction in Germany to the Princess Caroline decision – that the case would be taken to the Grand Chamber – subsided as it dawned on politicians that Strasbourg had done them something of a favour. Observers with a sense of history have noted that the tabloids’ self-justification, advanced in the name of press freedom, mirrors that of the ...”

“... at bay has invaded his home. Lucas goes berserk, and smashes the offender’s head inside the grand piano. In fact, almost none of the men in his family, brothers and cousins brought from North Carolina, can keep their fingers out of the pies they are supposed to be selling, and they are Lucas’s downfall. His ideal is not austerity but abstinence from ...”

“... In assembling  Le Dieu caché: les peintres du Grand Siècle et la vision de Dieu, a collection of 63 French 17th-century religious pictures which can be seen at the Villa Medici in Rome until 28 January, Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor challenge us to take theology as seriously as aesthetics. They also prove that it requires more than a sensitive eye and a generous imagination to understand a picture ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”

“... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...”

“... her reservations: ‘never was a court more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine ...”

“... myths in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, which jettisoned a grand narrative of statesmanship and party principle, and put in its place the microscopic study of individual politicians, their interests, networks and connections. Clearly, from around 1930 the Whig mythology that had for centuries shaped the narratives of ...”

“... to make London and New York laugh and whistle.’ Queen Victoria told Sullivan he should write a grand opera. Dismay intensified when he obeyed and made everyone yawn with Ivanhoe. Then Elgar arrived and Britain recognised what it had been waiting for. Sullivan’s shortcomings no longer mattered, and the nation ditched his serious music, retaining only ...”

“... to do both, though some of his most enthusiastic champions outside Hungary have seized on the grand themes of his work while paying little attention to the sly comedy that subverts any pretensions to grandeur. W.G. Sebald called The Melancholy of Resistance ‘a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned’, and Susan Sontag saw it as ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... In November of the following year he alerted his readers to the absence, in the art of David Hockney, of ‘the spiritual quest at the heart of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that ...”

“... to wear French fashions, buy French luxury products, eat French food, travel to France on the Grand Tour and affect what they called the ‘ton’ (French ‘tone’). According to a 1789 story in the Morning Post, quoted in Don Herzog’s book, the Earl of Scarborough kept ‘six French frizeurs, who have nothing else to do than dress his hair’. Even ...”

“... of militants, denouncing the corruption of the Saudi regime and its ties to the US, overran the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking thousands hostage. One of the hostage-takers declared himself to be the true Mahdi who had come to redeem Islam. The Saudi authorities, deeply shaken by this direct challenge to their rule, stormed the mosque at the cost of hundreds ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”