Search Results

“... daughters were better organised than their brothers, a forthright pronouncement that caused more foot shuffling. For Ahmad, as for the vast majority of locals, these are tough years. Business is going badly. He has more time than he really wants to devote to his directorship of the local football team, Malang United Soccer. He’s attempting to organise the ...”

“... evidence for survival was and is remarkably various. One example is the Cerne Abbas Giant, the 180-foot chalk figure with a thirty-foot erect phallus, dug deep into the chalk at what must have been an impressive cost in man-hours. A quarter of a mile away there lay, until the Reformation, one of the largest and richest ...”

“... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...”

“... the reader down so many interesting byways. In June 1951, Channon reports from the Commons that ‘Michael Foot, a real horror of the French Revolution type, made a vindictive, violent speech about Northern Ireland.’ It proves, on reading it in Hansard, to be an excellent speech criticising the treatment of Ulster Catholics as second-class ...”

“... Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street. Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance and the music that was playing throughout (the notion of music in an exhibition then thought quite daring), though I remember, too, coveting some of the portraits and drawings of the Diaghilev troupe and finding the wild ...”

“... early decades of this century, some Africans financed their pilgrimage by selling their children. Michael Wolfe’s The Hadj is the story of an American convert’s pilgrimage made in 1990. Wolfe, who also writes novels, conscientiously avoids the politics of the contemporary hajj and his responses seem curiously muted. He enjoyed many encounters with his ...”

“... books returned to the shelves). Beddoes would have been relieved to know that Judith Higgens and Michael Bradshaw have included none of The Improvisatore in their new and revised selection of his poetry. From The Brides’ Tragedy we get only highlights, but enough to see Beddoes’s developing skill as a poet. The intensity of his imagery and the often ...”

“... from the records – a most extreme example … In these mixed and extraordinary studies, with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot treading a path for modern science, Newton spent the first phase of his life … in Trinity when he did all his real work. Strachey found something of the same attraction in Newton’s ...”

“... in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to ...”

“... that out is only the start of an immense process of comparison and collation, manageable (as Michael Reeve wryly remarked 17 years ago) only under ideal conditions unlikely ever to be fulfilled. That said, Reeve’s new text, a collation of 11 of the most important manuscripts, is probably the best we’ve had since Geoffrey put his pen down, and it ...”

“... completely were they forgotten that last year, when the environmental consultants Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger rebuked the environmental movement for neglecting the resources of economic growth and human ingenuity, they seemed unaware that there had once been a movement in America that championed both. Nordhaus and Shellenberger wrote Break ...”

“... the militias, that wouldn’t be enough. People fear IS but some fear its opponents even more. As Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan argue, the strategy of Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, the forerunner of Islamic State, has been posthumously vindicated. Zarqawi argued that the mass murder of Shias would provoke revenge attacks, and as the sectarian ...”

“... the problem. There was talk of children with rickets who were wasting away in ditches dug at the foot of garbage heaps, of hands severed by knife-sharp train tracks, of raving madmen who lived chained up in squalid hovels with zinc roofs, of kidneys that had failed, of perforated duodenal ulcers, and of hernias about to rupture. And what if those sorrows are ...”

“... cartoonist Tandberg drew an older and slightly flushed Whitlam reverently placing a wreath at the foot of a more youthful-looking statue of himself. One theme of the memoirs is that Whitlam was destroyed by the conservative forces in Australian society. Even the British are familiar with the manner of his ‘destruction’, and how he was dismissed by the ...”

“... He is very interesting on this topic: ‘I like to surprise people, to catch them on the wrong foot. It’s sometimes a little childish, but it’s part of what I’ve been trying to accomplish; to offer people always another view, or a different angle; to encourage them, force them sometimes, to re-examine, to look at things a little differently ... To ...”