Search Results

“... that Elizabethan masquers would have told the Queen ‘that she was God, and that she had invented steel.’ If he felt initial doubts about the venture, he nevertheless forged ahead and sketched the outline of The Birth of Steel within a few days. The plot tells how a Medieval alchemist – aptly named Smith – is baffled ...”

“... and Coosje van Bruggen’s Bottle of Notes, a building-height bottle of lacy blue and white steel, teetering on its side, and a giant TV screen that always seemed to be advertising the 2012 Olympics or the latest government pronouncement: on the one hand perky, on the other grim. It’s not as if the Linthorpe Road is all there is. Since mima (think ...”

“... by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were ...”

“... likely to follow; he was already so weak that, to his great chagrin, he had to wear a leather and steel surgical corset. I have been told different stories about his death. My mother maintained that he died in a sanitorium near Menton to which he had been admitted when his condition unexpectedly worsened. My aunt, on the other hand, remembers being told ...”

“... attitude to the press shows his quest for justice at its most idiosyncratic. When the British Steel Corporation sought an order of the court to require Granada TV to disclose the source of the information used in a programme critical of BSC, Denning began by saying that ‘in general’ sources should be protected. But on second thoughts, he has told ...”

“... And, one mutters, reviewers carp. For all this, Taylor has a critical parti pris. Like John Carey, whom he admires, he subscribes to the simplifying (and Ray-reversing) view that Thackeray is a one-book author. Or, as Carey brutally puts it: ‘Thackeray’s career as a leading novelist began and ended with Vanity Fair. After that it was downhill ...”

“... parties, each with its own leader. Despite superficial good will between David Owen and David Steel, each had run his own show. In particular, David Owen had preferred the company and advice of a small group of friends to working through the Alliance. As the Alliance candidate in Milton Keynes, I had been fighting the best organised and most intensive ...”

“... opening. As frescos are fixed in situ, he had to vary his usual method: he had cement poured into steel frames ready to be surfaced with fresco plaster on his arrival. The Modern set him up in an empty gallery on 57th Street, where he worked non-stop with three assistants, all under the pressure of a steady stream of visitors, a curious media and a tight ...”

“... Whitehead is black and comparisons were made to Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. John Updike has called him ‘blithely gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the suggestion in its title ...”

“... to consolidate his place in the history books as Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister since John Major, shipping our boys out to the Gulf, boots or no boots, his rhetoric at least is wearing steel toe caps. ‘We are going to be in the front line of this whatever happens,’ he told the Commons Liaison ...”

“... on this book for several years; the task of completing it from his notes was carried out by John McDowell. (The first two chapters and the introduction were rewritten by Evans himself in the last months of his life.) Evans’s death at such an early age is a tragedy. We can have no real idea what his mature years might have brought forth, and this book ...”

“... desert, were grand. Among the best known is The Lightning Field, a vast grid of 400 stainless-steel poles staked out by de Maria on a New Mexico plain in 1977. Dia now also oversees the mother of all earthworks, Spiral Jetty, a great coil of rocks built by Robert Smithson into the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970.Initially directed by Heiner Friedrich, a ...”

“... Central Station in New York you see the opposite: massive masonry used to encase an elaborate steel frame, giving weight to a ceremonial statement. A picture of the Pompidou Centre shows the huge cast-steel gerberettes that transfer forces from the horizontal spans via vertical rods to the foundations; an engraving of ...”

“... number of the 47 novels to print. A new and complete edition of the letters (edited by N. John Hall) is about to take over from Bradford Booth’s handy but imperfect single volume. A new and definitive biography (by Hall again) is in hand. And there has been an astonishing number of monographs and hardbacked collections of essays on Trollope in the ...”

“... confided to me the same year by a woman in Berkeley: ‘I have never been on a train.’ The first steel (as opposed to short-lived iron) rail in the world was laid at the entrance to Derby Station in 1857 – an immediate consequence of Bessemer’s cheap steel-making process launched the previous year. Already, a mere ...”