Search Results

“... those traits which are the very antithesis of modern republicanism’. On the other hand, Dennis Kennedy has just described the Northern Irish state under Unionism as a ‘democracy’. The statelet was not a democracy, it was a holding operation which its founding fathers, Carson and Craig, thought would last only thirty years beyond 1921. It’s high ...”

“... Unearthly Child’ was broadcast on a date to conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic concept had come from Sydney Newman, the recently appointed head of drama at the BBC. He was looking for something that would hold children, teenagers and adults in the then-as-now transitional Saturday teatime slot, between Grandstand ...”

“... Was the Week That Was broadcast a sickeningly sycophantic tribute to the assassinated President Kennedy. There was no part of public life, he insisted, which was free of humbug and therefore immune to mockery. Peter’s own statements to journalists must always be treated with caution. He could rarely resist satirising himself or his interviewer, and ...”

“... several films a day. Black police vans scuttled past like creepy-crawlies. The Sun Foundry in Kennedy Street was belting out smoke. The chains in the swing park were all twisted up. Rattray’s Cycles was open in Murray Street and the Rottenrow Maternity Hospital did tea for visitors at 10 a.m. Rag and bone men appeared with balloons for ‘any old ...”

“... his manicures, orthodontics, his walnut-stain flesh, still failed to achieve the status of a Kennedy off-cut: cynics persisted in seeing him as a man who’d had so many blow jobs he looked like an inflatable. Marks could afford to grin out of the cover panel of Mr Nice. His teeth were white as glacial chippings, but they were paste. The price he paid ...”

“... His poems explore forms of celebrity femininity: he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who lined the ...”

“... while his long-suffering wife, Dorothy (they were married for 57 years), stayed at home. When Jane Russell, a family friend, and his co-star on two films including Macao – the film which prompted Howard Hughes to write a multi-page memo on the subject of her breasts – was asked to choose her favourite Mitchum film, she said: ‘I just like ...”

“... as N829MG when it was used on 8 October 2002 to fly the Canadian citizen Maher Arar from Kennedy airport to Jordan and on to Syria, where he was held in a coffin-sized cell and tortured for ten months before being told that his arrest was a mistake. After this incident was exposed, the Gulfstream’s registration was changed to N259SK. The main base ...”

“... the Beatles, are grouped around an unfolding, vulval red rose. The only woman depicted is Jackie Kennedy in the open car, pink pillbox hat turned towards her husband as he clutches his throat. II is all women, soft-porn pin-ups surrounding a stark, full-frontal nude with pubic hair, all set against the landscape garden at Stourhead. Two sorts of nature ...”

“... they course through that I couldn’t find an origin. Like Hamlet, Frankenstein’s creature or Jane Eyre, the persona of Augustine has a life of his own: such figures are figments that become autonomous beings, acting in further conversations between pieces of literature and imagination. ‘The tendency to weave stories where evidence is missing is the ...”

“... Sir Francis Drake and Sir Francis Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval ...”

“... a sojourn at Lake Arrowhead. Temporarily without work himself, he had come along with his wife, Jane Wyman, on location to shoot The Yearling. He took out a motorboat, communed with his conscience, and saw that something in America had gone badly wrong. Was he meant to be a leader more than an actor, and might his second career pass through leadership of ...”

“... about writing or assembling poems), its slow take-off then rapid ascent; his election in 1911 as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge; his separate apotheoses as scholar and poet. Apart from a sabbatical term in 1934, he lectured in Cambridge twice a week for 25 years, until only days before his death. He was aware that the less he said the more was said ...”

“... stop him going on to get Joan pregnant, marrying and breaking up with his young secretary, Jane, dropping acid and hosting a rolling orgy at his grand Manhattan apartment. So powerful is the masculine culture of the agency that even men who don’t work there are enthralled by its mythology of dominant men and compliant women. When Joan takes her ...”

“... a feminist backstory to this argument. Twenty years ago, in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Jane Gallop made a plea for the erotics of teaching: a case made more effectively by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, which had appeared three years before. All hooks’s teachers at a segregated school in Kentucky had been black women who, although they ...”