Search Results

“... than a dash of fiction or imaginative reconstruction. The late Desmond Stewart’s book (which Alan Neame, who introduces it, neatly describes as an ‘intuitive biography’) belongs to the second class. Though it draws on scholarship, it is not a book for scholars; his reading, though wide, was patchy (nothing written in German appears in his ...”

“... perhaps what nasty things can go on in what Margaret Thatcher’s well-bred Minister of State, Alan Clark, tastefully described as Bongo Bongo Land. They should read this, from Kochan and Whittington’s little book: ‘BCCI made hay out of the London connection. Arabs from the newly-enriched Gulf States came to the UK to enjoy the casinos, buy ...”

“... in interiors being ‘very Buckinghamshire’ and her mother’s alleged failure to adhere to Alan Ross’s snobs’ charter on U and non-U. The Middletons have been further mocked for having commissioned a coat of arms. Certain patterns of behaviour recur. With a sure populist instinct Diana gave the people what she wanted to give them in controlled ...”

“... since 2008, must have chuckled. At last, a New Labour reunion in the land of the free. All that ‘light-touch’ regulation was bearing rich fruit. Virtually every senior member of the Blair and Brown cabinets went to work for a corporation that had benefited from their policies. The former health secretary ...”

“... produced by its conference in December 1979 asserted that ‘our party forged with the strongest light and the purest steel had a decisive moment and generated the National Construction Plan … the communists rose up and the earth shook and as the earth shook the comrades advanced.’ At the 1988 Party Congress, held clandestinely in Lima, Guzmán said that ...”

“... who recalls his summer as the little boy running between the secret lovers, Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Redgrave’s gaze in that film is watery and blank, which seems right for a man so psychologically traumatised by childhood memories that he had shut down his emotions. In retrospect, though, this had less to do with acting than with the Parkinson’s ...”

“... as ‘a minor, less rigorous form’. It’s worth pausing over this preference, especially in the light of a possibly failed career in alchemy. We can distinguish between what a person does well (does incomparably) and what he or she likes to do; and between achievement and self-perception. We don’t need hard lines of division, of course, and ...”

“... held secrets of Chinese porcelain, offering local supplies to satisfy a huge demand for fine, light and hard ceramic vessels that weren’t damaged by hot liquids and didn’t impart off-flavours. The combination of fashion and femininity in early 18th-century tea culture offered masculine critics a soft target. The tea table was attacked as ‘the seat ...”

“... start with Konrad Heiden’s, written in Hitler’s lifetime, and go on through the works of Alan Bullock, Eberhard Jäckel and Joachim Fest to reach Ian Kershaw and now Ullrich’s large, steady book – again, the first of two projected volumes. So is it really Hitler’s personality and private life that we still need to know about? Who he was, and ...”

“... it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may ...”

“... government rebranded Labour’s Child Poverty Commission as the Social Mobility Commission, with Alan Milburn as its head. Milburn gave a lot of attention to recruitment to elite positions – his flagship report was on fair access to the professions – but the commission’s analyses and recommendations as a whole were much more extensive, including work ...”

“... strangle her. That look, whose perfidious implications he understood, had just shone a terrifying light into his soul.Vautrin is at the heart of two Balzac novels – Père Goriot and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes – and plays a crucial part in another between: Illusions perdues. In each case, his sexuality drives the action: he fails to bring the ...”

“... crockery.In the main room of Yeats’s tower at Ballylee, with the shallow stream below and the light coming in at the green-framed window, I looked at Seamus and Karl and suddenly had a vision of a time when they would no longer be alive, and a time when none of us would be alive. At the top of the tower the sheer green of the trees gave out to other ...”

“... graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be ...”

“... novels. Both are forgivable – or at least Alun is finally forgiven by some of his friends in the light of their own moral frailties, and Patrick, being to a large extent the empathetic, if not sympathetic central consciousness of his story, its ego if not its hero, can as little be absolutely rejected in the end by the reader of the novel as by Jenny ...”