Search Results

“... 1858, two English ornithologists went to see the great auk for themselves. John Wolley and Alfred Newton travelled to the south-west peninsula of Iceland, hoping to visit Eldey and return with some specimens to add to their collections. Newton even dreamed of capturing a live auk for London Zoo. But their trip was a failure. Bad weather made the ...”

“... 1980s, the US Coastguard trained pigeons to recognise people lost at sea as part of Project Sea Hunt. The birds were placed in observation bubbles mounted on the bottom of helicopters and trained to peck at buttons when they spotted a scrap of coloured fabric floating in the sea. Pigeons were able to find the fabric 93 per cent of the time. Human subjects ...”

“... ungrateful people demanding independence might get more than they bargained for, he warned. Alfred Duggan’s two novels about the end of empire, The Little Emperors and Conscience of the King (both 1951), once again drew an explicit parallel, with Duggan pointing out that neither the Roman withdrawal from Britain nor the British withdrawal from India ...”

“... notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt the carted hares of thirty years ago. We do not ask ourselves and one another and every poor devil we meet “How do you define Imagination?” or “What is the difference between talent and genius?”, and score an easy triumph by anticipating the answer ...”

“... went to a performance at the English Opera House on 29 August, and wrote appreciatively to Leigh Hunt about Cooke’s acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the novel on the strength of the interest ...”

“... of his tusks.’ Against this advice one might note the fate of the beater employed by the Nagpur Hunt in 1912, who was knocked to the ground and, despite adopting precisely the attitude prescribed above, was gored so badly that his lungs were exposed. Another unfortunate, in the following year, was gored in a similar way and with similarly fatal results, the ...”

“... It didn’t take long for this scum to destroy or to enslave the Indians obstructing then hunt for gold. By 1853 Special Indian Agent Stevenson, reporting random killings of Indians, lamented to his superiors that ‘nothing but Indian evidence ... could be obtained to punish these villains, and as the Indian’s evidence is not allowed against any ...”

“... no butter. What do you have?’ After the murder, with the newspapers running stories about the hunt for the ‘wolfman’, he starts eating piles of junk food. He also starts wandering around Chicago dressed as a woman, looking for a way of getting beaten up, until he finally jumps off Sears Tower. There has always been a great deal of sexual unease in ...”

“... in the 1960s have gradually come to resemble rivers again, in which fish can swim and herons can hunt. The urban air is cleaner. A lot of these species are enchanting to us urbanites unworried about lambs or crops. When a coyote appeared on Bernal Heights in San Francisco, it became a local celebrity, though other coyotes in the city have remained relatively ...”

“... Austria. Lauda is now most famous for his antagonistic relationship with the English driver James Hunt, immortalised in Ron Howard’s movie Rush, and for his crash at the Nürburgring in the 1976 German Grand Prix, when he spun off the track on his second lap. The resulting fire burned his eyelids off and gave him the facial scars he would carry for the rest ...”

“... with facts, let alone facts selected to make up a celebratory patriotic narrative stretching from Alfred and the cakes to the imperial triumphs of ‘Clive of India’ (Gove’s term): it was an academic discipline, like physics or economics, it had its methods just as they did, and central to what teachers sought to convey to their pupils was the ability to ...”

“... threatened to kill themselves on a number of occasions. On 8 October, for example, Baader had told Alfred Klaus, head of the Special Commission on Terrorism, that they would soon reach an ‘irreversible decision’ if prison conditions were not improved. The following day Ensslin also asked to see Klaus. She told him that, unless improvements were made, the ...”

“... had been feeling while he wrote it like a middle-aged schoolmaster preparing a report on little Alfred’s work and behaviour.’ That counted as rough stuff in 1946. The magazine English devoted its front-page editorial to an excited account of this ‘spirited controversy’, and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond ...”

“... published a book in ten years. And the novel turned even some sympathetic reviewers into hangmen. Alfred Kazin reported feeling ‘embarrassment, even pity, that so important a writer can make such a travesty of himself’. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the next year a (greatly deserved) Nobel Prize. But he was being ...”

“... here in 1990) borrows the form of a Chandleresque detective story for the tale of a hunt for a mutant Manchurian sheep with the ability to inhabit people’s minds. Having possessed (or ‘sheeped’) a soldier in the Imperial Army in the Thirties, it has turned him into an underworld Boss whose extensive outreach includes most of the public ...”