Search Results

“... Baker’s only contribution to the genre of the parody-anthology. I don’t quite want to say to Simon Brett that he should come back because all is forgiven, but at least his Faber Book of Parodies (1984) wasn’t a breath of fresh air. The field is still held by Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies, first published here in 1961 ...”

“... Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay MacDonald’s ill-fated Cabinet to argue against dole cuts in 1931. Michael died as the brave new postwar world of the UN and the welfare state was taking shape. The diaries also record Benn’s obsessive love affair with the square mile of Westminster (‘my ...”

“... There is​ still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ‘We shall fight on the beaches ...”

“... The ideas expressed by Charles Darwin, R.J. Campbell, Sir Oliver Lodge, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Karl Marx, Noah Ablett were treasured in their minds as well as in the books they carried in their pockets.’ As late as the 1950s, Plato’s Republc was taken out more often from Merthyr’s public library than from any other in Great Britain. For ...”

“... proceedings is not possible by any other means.’ The second relevant amendment was that of Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, which proposed to prevent a judge from ordering the procedure unless satisfied that the damage the disclosure would do to national security would outweigh the public interest in the fair and open ...”

“... of all kinds. One by-product of their operations was scientific discovery. As the historian Simon Mills has shown, the chaplains sent by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the Levant Company’s factories in the Eastern Mediterranean returned with books for Bodley’s Library and a mummy for the Ashmolean. Edward Pococke brought back not only ...”

“... constant pressure over performance. He immediately pinched a couple of people from Network Rail: Simon Kirby, who was in charge of major projects (including huge station renewals at Birmingham, Reading and London Bridge), and Tom Kelly, a communications strategist versed in the dark arts – he was Alistair Campbell’s successor at Number Ten. Higgins ...”

“... cigarette smoke hanging over noisy rooms on the Upper West Side or Greenwich Village where Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg and a supporting cast of kibitzers engaged in rhetorical (and, in Greenberg’s case, actual) fisticuffs. Like many men of ideas with impossibly high standards of intellectual probity, they could also be ...”