Search Results

“... a disaster. This is what first bound together Ranelagh’s galère, ranging from Keith Joseph to Alan Walters, from Alfred Sherman to Denis Thatcher: the Institute of Economic Affairs competing the while with Enoch Powell for the role of the enduring spiritual godfather whose time had come. Ranelagh’s book is badly organised. Having begun as an attempt to ...”

“... and Tati. (Anyone who doubts the honesty and pathos Sellers brought to the part should check out Alan Arkin’s dreadful Inspector Clouseau in the eponymous 1968 movie.) Of course it must be easy to allow such memories to be erased by the succession of lazy, self-indulgent performances he turned out throughout the late Sixties and Seventies. By the time he ...”

“... Prussian manufacturing might do – and what it might avoid. He was also carrying out a little light industrial espionage. Under his influence Schinkel saw more of the factories and less of the country houses and historical sites than he had intended. The pair nevertheless visited Holyrood and the ‘Ossianic isles’ of Staffa and Iona. Schinkel’s ...”

“... thought, she is too eclectic and inconsistent in her methodology (as suggested by the savaging Alan Ryan gave her book on Mill); while to hard-nosed historians of political action, she seems altogether too preoccupied with ideology (as shown by the severe criticisms of her attempt to analyse the passing of the Second Reform Bill in these terms). For the ...”

“... than drinking probably polluted water. His reply to all discipline problems was a blow, heavy or light according to the size of the offender. On the other hand, he would have thought it shameful to eat on his own, from a private menu: he ate with his labourers. He rarely had any money, and he never owned a purse, tying all his coins into his handkerchief and ...”

“... I hung around with in my pre-teen years were always losing the head. During the good weather, the light nights, what started off as a game of rounders or crazy golf would end up as a game of clubbing the neighbour’s cat to death. A night of camping on the playing-fields could usually be turned into an opportunity for the wrecking of vegetable gardens, or ...”

“... at different times in his life hinted that he voted both Labour and Tory. This misses the point. Alan Bennett says he had little faith that Peter’s drink problem would be solved at Alcoholics Anonymous – Peter’s sense of the ridiculous would be bound to overcome him at the meetings. Similarly, he could never have joined, or with any consistency ...”

“... o hyd.                                            Alan Llwyd This englyn, as so often, is dependent on particular Welsh assonances, but in at least some cases, and certainly in Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogi, the achievements are accessible in translation. Consider only this brief extract from the technique ...”

“... twitching twat’. In his useful study of the US literary left, Exiles from a Future Time (2002), Alan Wald argues that Hayes’s ‘bitter meditations on class privilege’ had been transmuted into ‘untrammelled and misogynous violence’. This may have played a part in Hayes’s disappearance from public view; certainly his dislike of self-promotion ...”

“... on the page, as if Houellebecq has lost belief in the entire project and is writing a little light porn to amuse himself. It just so happens that, besides being young, rich and sexually ravenous, and having ‘superb breasts, round and high, so swollen and firm that they looked artificial’, Valérie swings both ways. Every young boy’s dream. It may ...”

“... were right-wing – or became so – and it is hard to think of many caring novelists making light of a crisis in Abyssinia. Posh people had more jokes just as they had more teacups, and when they sat down to write both were in evidence. More than that, however, the posh aesthetic appeals to readers who want life’s profundities to scatter on the wind ...”

“... rise architectural attack on London. His wish to put the record straight made him, in the critic Alan Powers’s words, ‘an angry old man, not a grand old man’. After he finally closed his office, and to ensure that his claims would not be forgotten, he lodged five hundred boxes of his papers with the archive of the RIBA. Nigel Warburton is not an ...”

“... with the murder of one of them, but in spite of clear direction from an upright Scottish judge, Alan Ker, the grand jury of local property-owners would not indict him. This pattern was repeated in the attempts that followed to bring Eyre and some of his officers to justice in England. In recounting the public row that erupted in England, from a large range ...”

“... together’); they are strangling the world in cables as well as glueing it up, but are also light enough and insidious enough to dart between brains and poison raindrops. The scenario might have seemed twee and over-familiar – middle-class person escapes to the countryside to find himself – were it not for Buckmaster’s madness, and his desire to ...”

“... Andrew Adonis’s crisp and affectionate Life with any other impression. Adonis is naturally more light-footed than Alan Bullock was in his three-volume masterwork on Bevin (Bullock only allotted Hitler a single, though memorable, volume), but the picture he presents is much the same. Bevin’s achievements are simply so ...”