Search Results

“... new thoughts. Even as he describes his tremulous excitement as he first pores over the work of Paul Goodman or Norman O. Brown, we suspect that the excitement has as much to do with these thinkers’ viability in the intellectual marketplace as with the blinding rightness of their insights. There was invariably some strategic, career-planning element in ...”

“... that could make him an ugly customer in private life or politics, as the manure merchant, Mr Hamilton, was one of the first to find when he offered to assist a sozzled undergraduate Parnell recumbent in Station Road, Cambridge, and was promptly knocked flat for his pains. Parnell seems to have been propelled by a consuming resentment of English patronage ...”

“... for composition. Even Acton’s best friends sometimes despaired. Asked maliciously by Eddie Hamilton ‘whether there was to be any result from such wondrous accumulations of knowledge’, W.E. Gladstone thought that Acton would have difficulty in finding a publisher for a dozen volumes on liberty, ‘but being so well versed in history, especially that ...”

“... need to publicise. In Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), Ian Hamilton quotes Brooke’s Rugby and Cambridge friend Geoffrey Keynes on the underlying causes of the Eddie-Ranee stand-off: Brooke’s unmanly physical beauty was often taken as an indication that he was probably a homosexual … It had, of course, been far ...”

“... Chapter titles in Light, Air and Openness, Paul Overy’s new look at modern architecture between the wars, describe the dream that the style underwrote: ‘The City in the Country’, ‘The House of Health’, ‘Built into the Sun’ and so on.* In the recently restored De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, a rare early example of the international style in England, the Modernist spirit has been so well revived that if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved ...”

“... New Statesman. A couple of years ago, in an inspired piece of commissioning, they asked Christine Hamilton to review An Accidental MP, Martin Bell’s account of how he ended up wearing nothing but white suits. And now they’ve got Honor Fraser, a supermodel, to write about Nicholas Blincoe’s latest novel, White Mice (Sceptre, £10.99), because it’s set ...”

“... Sugar’s partner-in-salvation, who helped to draw up the Spurs takeover package that sent Paul Gascoigne off to Lazio. EL Tel genuinely wanted to keep Gascoigne but he knew that the Midland Bank would never allow a near-insolvent Company to hang onto its prime asset. However, he also knows the fan-mentality, and he has somehow managed to persuade us ...”

“... Abbey’ by Samuel Prout (date unknown) ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths’ by Paul Nash (1935) ‘The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum’ by John Martin (1822) ‘Sketch for Hadleigh Castle’ by John Constable (1828-9)PreviousNext Within it there are tantalising themes. The one which the Tate’s collection is best suited to develop ...”

“... weeks than in the past few years, but maybe they have. It’s one thing to get berated by bearded Paul Krugman and irascible Barney Frank; it’s another to be told to shut up (‘Money talks … too much,’ one poster read) by an ever growing group of nice-looking kids. For banking to stop siphoning off some of the brightest people around would be a good ...”

“... the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a ...”

“... don’t you go writing any more of them, Melvyn, until we’ve all had time to catch up.’ Even Paul Theroux’s most devoted readers might by now be puffing a bit and asking for time to catch up. After a fertile beginning (five books in the first seven or so years), Theroux has doubled his striking rate: since Sinning with Annie (1975) he has published 14 ...”

“... well known and, at the age of 80, under constant demands for help, he passed his archive to the Paul Mellon Centre in London, which has now published it as this Dictionary, under the editorship of John Ingamells. The Dictionary is unique in its comprehensiveness. No traveller from the British Isles or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere ...”

“... Mouse equipped with machine gun and tripod. There’s another machine gun among a cluster of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s sculptures. Patrick Keiller’s 2012 installation The Robinson Institute (which also involved the filmmaker trawling the Tate archives) supplies several apposite works, among them Leonard Rosoman’s 1942 painting Bomb Falling into Water. In ...”

“... movie still of Greta Garbo in The Kiss. The major turning-point is Romney’s ‘Portrait of Lady Hamilton as Circe’. His sexual infatuation with his model is so intense and palpable as to define a tradition that continues unbroken down to the latest Playboy centrefold: the loosened hair, the eyes set in a lustful stare, the half-open rosebud ...”

“... of rank and race is more ambiguous than he wants to admit. He quotes the wife (unnamed) of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, installed as Governor of Fiji in 1874, who found the manners of the high-ranking Fijians ‘so perfectly easy and well bred. Nurse can’t understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I don’t like to tell her that these ...”