Search Results

“... abbreviated as the Dictionary’s. Was it fear, diffidence or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with ...”

“... partly because they never saw even the great postwar champions like Ted Schroeder, Frank Parker, Eric Sturgess, and there are no videos of what Wadie quaintly refers to as ‘vintage’ players, partly because today’s champions are focused so exclusively on tennis, with endless exercise and hitting drills and virtually nothing else to do except take care ...”

“... in 1968, there is a grand old painter called Harry Bretton. He is modelled, I would guess, on Eric Gill, for the Life, and Stanley Spencer, for the Work. Musing by the studio window, he considers his place in history: Turner was the greatest English painter, and was safely dead, did not encroach or suggest comparisons. But at the end he had petered ...”

“... hard to eat for two (and partake of the standard rieslings) for less than £100. A passage about Eric Varley, the former Labour Secretary of State for Industry, echoes the contrast in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom ...”

“... Charlie Wilson, the sort of father you see by the hundred in France on Sunday outings ... [Gordon] Goody, nerves of steel and the wolfish handsomeness of the pack leader ... The events were so vividly in the minds of the actors that they remember, like Henry V at Agincourt, what feats they did that day.’ Never mind Agincourt, note the ‘little ...”

“... in South Africa. They have been in full communion with the Church of England for 50 years, and Gordon Huelin’s collection of essays, Old Catholics and Anglicans 1931-1981, celebrates the success of this broad-church enterprise in a pleasant manner which would delight Baxter. C.H. Sisson writes about Baxter in Anglican Essays, with respect but little ...”

“... to ‘the lesser Thackeray’ – Trollope. He refines an argument originally put forward by Gordon Ray: that Thackeray’s great project in fiction was to ‘redefine’ the gentlemanly ideal for a middle-class Victorian ethos. Historically, Gilmour sees the Victorian preoccupation with gentlemanliness (and its derivative, ‘manliness’) as signalling ...”

“... thirty-minute episode was broadcast live at 8 p.m. on Thursday, 29 January 1942, to the strains of Eric Coates’s ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’, apparently inspired by the view from Selsey towards Bognor Regis. It featured on the Forces Programme, which had been set up to provide a richer diet of drama, music and variety than the staid and news-oriented Home ...”

“... realised historical fiction, and with The Strange Death of Labour Scotland by Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw, published in 2012, which uncannily anticipates the party’s recent evaporation. Devine’s story ends at a fork in the road. Is independence imminent? Or has the collapse in the price of oil severely undermined the case for leaving the United ...”

“... The recent French presidential election rubbed the point in painfully; as has the elevation of Gordon Brown on this side of the Channel. Neither Roberto Unger nor Jacques Attali undervalues the achievements of social democracy, or indeed of state socialism. But both suggest that in either case any reprise or development now depends on finding a different ...”

“... were, or were to become, fellows of the Royal Society). A Lancashire businessman, Wing-Commander Eric James, praised here for his skill in dealing with ‘tiresome intrigues’ and ‘something like chaos’, eventually got things running smoothly; after the war he became head of GCHQ at Cheltenham. Enciphered enemy messages, broadcast in morse or ...”

“... left the civil service after the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death, but returned when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.) Cameron appointed Greensill, who had left Citigroup to start his own firm, as an adviser. He was given a desk in the Cabinet Office and a secure Number Ten email address. In 2014, he was made a UK crown representative ...”

“... that neither he nor Niven seemed as perturbed as I was at his nakedness.26 February. Reading about Eric Ravilious as I have to talk in a film being made by Margy Kinmonth, I find a good quote on the Second World War: ‘I regretted that we were being called upon to fight against something regarded as wrong without at the same time having the conviction that we ...”

“... to Suffolk to live on as a clergyman’s daughter, despite her loss of faith. The failed poet Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying also cuts himself off from his family and everyone who’s close to him, but nonetheless ends up getting his girl pregnant, marrying her, and acquiring both an aspidistra and a job.Orwell later wanted to suppress A ...”

“... proles. Stability and continuity urgently needed reinforcement, on both sides of the fence. As Eric Hobsbawm argued in Age of Extremes (1994), in two decades of peaceful development the ‘shorter 20th century’ had managed to generate a new relatively advantaged class, which aspired to something a lot better. Civil society seemed to have got way ahead of ...”