Search Results

“... and Sullivan in the metrically exuberant, sexually discreet translation of Benjamin Bickley Rogers. But the under-presence of the ancient freedom is everywhere, for those with ears to hear. The charge of not-quite-perfectly-concealed, intense homoerotic emotion in Housman’s scoutmasterish ‘love of comrades’ is a good example. It might almost be ...”

“... sort of writing Smith tries out here, the seemingly non-fictional sort seen in the novels of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, and in Smith’s own essays. As the title On Beauty had been already used by Elaine Scarry, so Swing Time has been borrowed from the title of the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle, a black and ...”

“... 1967 it remained outside all the coalition governments, ostracised thanks by and large to David Ben-Gurion, whose governing slogan was ‘Without Herut or Maki’ (the Israeli Communist Party). Gahal joined the Government for the first time during the crisis of May 1967, when Levi Eshkol was prime minister. Begin had the title of Minister without ...”

“... understood … how extreme the words coming out of her mouth really were.After the speech, Ivan Rogers, Britain’s permanent representative to the EU, said to May: ‘You’ve made a decision. This gives me clarity. I can work with this. We’re leaving the customs union.’ ‘I have agreed to no such thing,’ May fired back. But perhaps an even more ...”

“... was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description of himself as ...”

“... all. The accent could have gone through rubbing shoulders as a young man with the more well-spoken Ben Nicholson, say, or Kenneth Clark. But I would have thought that in the Thirties he needed to get rid of it (or at least knock the edges off it) in order to be taken seriously, whereas thirty years later, in Hockney’s day, a sculptor from a similar ...”

“... book on Europe’s politics today’), and Britain’s former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers (‘brilliant’ – the sixth award of this epithet). But the two books are not on the same level. The Passage to Europe could legitimately claim to be a work of political realism. It laid bare central arcana imperii of European integration, as Naudé ...”