Search Results

“... greatest comedy and one of the greatest comedies in English’. More recently, Howard Erskine-Hill, pursuing a political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American ...”

“... Busson. My mistake.) Some of its trustees turn up in politics: the Conservatives’ Lord Fink and Paul Marshall, a Lib Dem and chairman of Marshall Wace, a large hedge fund. Marshall is also the chair of the DfE’s board of non-executive directors. Until recently, Sir Theodore Agnew of the Inspiration Trust, which runs 12 schools in Norfolk, was also a Ned ...”

“... yet have a particular meaning. For some reason not yet clear to me, I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s ...”

“... so I’ve decided to stop being one. After a while we got his new business card: Lanchester Jean-Paul Monet. You’re getting more French, we said, but you can’t speak French. I’m working on it, he said: the key lifestyle decision is the name change. You have to call me ‘Lanchester’ now. What with work, Arthur, the gym, the shooting classes and ...”

“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them ...”

“... he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private Function, the most ...”

“... who grew up on it liked its oddness without quite understanding how creepy it was. I mean, Benny Hill? And then we wake up one day, in 2012, and wonder why so many of them turned out to be deviants and weirdos. Our papers explode in outrage and we put on our Crucible expressions before setting off to the graveyard to take down the celebrity graves and break ...”

“... you’re the one trying to hold it together or the one who’s trying to prise the sides apart.Paul Gilroy – one of Hall’s many illustrious former students – suspects it was frustration with New Labour, and what it did to left politics, that led Hall in the 1990s to spend more and more time working on ‘less depressing’ Black Arts projects ...”

“... in the Locked Diary (it is included in the Abinger edition of Forster’s Indian memoir The Hill of Devi). In the ultra-laconic entries for 1924 he records: ‘Aug 19. Had B.S. at 46 Gordon Square. Aug 25. Had R.P. at Ham Spray’ (R.P. is Ralph Partridge, then married to Dora Carrington). What were these ‘havings’, one wonders? It’s a rakish term ...”

“... again. Prats also took Tàpies to the house of a private collector, where he first saw work by Paul Klee. Slowly, courtesy of Prats, he got to know about contemporary art, but this seemed to increase his sense of isolation as well as his desperation to find a way out for himself. ‘Had we lived under normal circumstances,’ he writes, ‘I might have ...”

“... is gone. The big favour she does ask of John is that he build her a dream mansion in Chapel Hill, complete with indoor swimming-pool and matching treehouses for the children, each measuring more than 1000 square feet. This is his ‘cancer gift’ to her, but when it gets built, not only is it a significant drain on the family finances (remember, the ...”

“... of each other to avoid running below privately owned foundations, as at Chancery Lane and Notting Hill Gate. The consequence was the series of sharp curves and gradients which still jolt passengers today but in the early days of the Tube were more extreme, often hurling travellers against each other. Since the City & South London was, uniquely for the era, a ...”

“... from it – but they’ve fallen away from the natural world and been reassigned to human beings. Paul Keegan put this well in a remark about the changing temper of ‘nature writing’ in recent years. ‘The threatening in nature,’ he wrote, ‘has been exchanged for the idea of nature under threat’ (LRB, 20 July 1995). At the same time, Keegan ...”

“... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...”

“... view is Tim Lang, who began his radical contemplation of food during the 1970s, when he worked a hill farm in Lancashire. He’s now professor of food policy at City University. It was Lang who showed me Woolton’s map, with its premonition of food miles, a concept he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn ...”