Search Results

“... for short – within walking distance of Notting Hill. In the 1950s, the area was the domain of Peter Rachman, the Polish-born refugee turned slum landlord who exploited the hostility of the housing market towards Black immigrants, buying up run-down houses in Paddington and North Kensington and renting them to desperate people at extortionate ...”

“... Captain’s Log (‘with Graham Clark’) and Blue Grit by Glasgow Rangers’ John Brown (‘with Peter Watson’). Would Brown reveal some juicy Gazza tales or give us the dirt on Graeme Souness? Not a chance. Gascoigne is not mentioned (perhaps he arrived too late) and as for Souness: ‘I haven’t got a bad word to say about Graeme. I don’t know if he ...”

“... that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... am’ poems are nearly all attempts to capture the lives of various city types – a man in a bowler hat, a prostitute, a jack-the-lad – or explore the institutions that govern daily life: ‘I am your master and your master’s master’ (‘Money’); ‘I am the fairy tale, the lovely lie, the brighter-than-truth’ (‘Hollywood’): I am the ...”

“... Among the few groups perceived as uncool are Ulster’s Protestant Unionists. It’s not only that bowler hats epitomise 1950s squareness, or that the symbolic meaning of orange sashes rather undermines their potential to offer a swish of colourful ethnic pluralism; there is also something in Ulster straightness – a dour literalism – which repels groups ...”

“... yards from the Bank of England, while incoming tides of men crossed London Bridge every morning in bowler hats. Livingstone at first struggled to find a niche for himself in this pre-swinging capital. An 11-plus failure, he’d spent his years at the brand-new Tulse Hill Comprehensive avoiding mental or physical exercise of almost any kind. Two inspirational ...”

“... last moment, now has it in her arms as though it had been there all along. Colin, who is wearing a bowler hat and leather gloves and earning £1200 a year on the London Stock Exchange, looks as if he’d just got away with an ingenious robbery. Secrecy was paramount. As far as Colin’s parents knew, Maureen had given birth to the bright new member of the ...”

“... pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... last few years. First in Patricia Hearst’s 1996 thriller, Murder at San Simeon; more recently in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow. In the style of a docudrama, the film depicts a weekend pleasure cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst’s 208-foot yacht, the Oneida, in November 1924. Hearst’s guests included Chaplin, Ince (whose birthday it was) and ...”

“... writings, the first detailed depictions of the Christian hell appear. In the Apocalypse of Peter, an apocryphal text from perhaps the early second century, the damned, as in Dante, receive bespoke punishments: blasphemers hang by their tongues, adulterers by their genitals and so on. The history of this iconography, Dante notwithstanding (and Casey is ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them? I never met or saw Britten, though he and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe sometime in 1961. Included in the programme was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not ...”

“... it among the music played by the band as the ranks of veterans proceeded up Whitehall wearing bowler hats and medals. And he persuaded a major record company to release a performance of it by the band of a Guards regiment. It was a habit of his to quote out of nowhere and out of context the lines from Henry V, ‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a ...”