Search Results

“... and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago, the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the more magisterial pronouncement that his ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... and lord treasurer, and left an enormous body of papers. His correspondence, now dispersed in four major and a number of minor collections, dominates the political history of Elizabeth’s reign. Even more important, in some respects, are the unique series of memoranda written in his distinctive, neat and spidery hand. They range from scribbled notes from ...”

“... Geoffrey Parker’s new book on the Thirty Years’ War is the first major study of the subject to appear in English for nearly half a century. To be more exact, it is now 47 years since the publication of a book on the war by C.V. Wedgwood, as she was then. That graceful and perceptive study – a remarkable achievement for a 28-year-old historian – remains an example of traditional narrative history at its formal best ...”

“... a chilling subject-matter fixed with a steady eye, The Witches of Eastwick through the potency of John Updike’s imaginative release. On the Perimeter records what Caroline Blackwood found at Greenham Common and in the town of Newbury, when she visited the nuclear protest encampments there in March this year, shortly before the town council attempted to ...”

“... John Kennedy was killed 25 years ago, on 22 November 1963. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known familiarly as the Warren Commission, issued its report a little less than a year later. In the report, members of the commission allowed that certain questions remained unanswered, but their conclusion left no room for doubt: ‘The commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy ...”

“... pleased to be included in the massive antitrust lawsuit brought by the US government against 17 major Wall Street firms for colluding to maintain high fees for securities underwriting. Not to have been on the list would have implied that the firm was of little significance. Very occasionally, Goldman Sachs made a splash by landing some extraordinary ...”

“... keep a journal at Racedown, but she took it up again at Dove Cottage after William and his brother John had gone off on a visit, leaving her alone a few days. ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he comes ...”

“... the Obscure resembles Dickensian black comedy turned absurdist, the epitaphic aspirations of a John Chivery in Little Dorrit chilled to the bone, then the receding acknowledgment of Hades-bound presences in the narrative coda of The Newcomes provides the textual obverse of Amy Dorrit’s confidence in closural inscription, which seems for her the ...”

“... governess, Miss Tink. Miss Tink, for all the monosyllabic innocence of her name, had a bad cousin, John, who may well also have influenced the child Borges, because he was one of the street-corner ‘hoodlums’ who later fascinated him, partly for being so brave as well as bad, when they fought, and partly because he saw them as ideal compendia of the local ...”

“... Clearly, the latter, though they are one to whom everyone is keen to pretend to defer. When John Reid, the health secretary, was discussing his reasons for not wanting to ban smoking in public places, he said he ‘worried about the unanimity of middle-class health professionals’ on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were ...”

“... Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this ...”

“... in 1977 – requires that we take his views seriously, at least on the first of these claims. The major part of the book is devoted to explaining, in non-mathematical language, the new science that the authors see emerging, and to which Prigogine helped to give birth. The ideas are hard, but I think they succeed. There are places, particularly in their ...”

“... bluff,’ one of the characters says. ‘This is Detroit.’ He says this in the midst of a major piece of bluffing. So why is the title card so disturbing? Partly because of the absence of any indication of which facts are at issue. Given the manifest intention of the film to address urgent political and social questions, the effect of the card is to ...”

“... else would. And we all know that, in a photo-finish, Wallace almost did; or, if we are to believe John Langdon Brooks, really did. If philosophers have been attracted to these historical sites, it is partly because the pattern of simultaneous discovery might seem to substantiate a relatively uncomplicated, inductivist account of scientific innovation. Once ...”