Search Results

“... hacking at the News of the World collapsed. On 20 June, a few months after Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, News International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”

“... closed for cleaning) in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... to dispose of their dog, for no particular reason except to ‘simplify their life’. The boy, David, of kindergarten age, can hardly share this hope but makes no plea in the animal’s favour: ‘The dog has crammed itself behind the pipes beneath the kitchen sink. David squats before him, blowing gently on his ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... they have no feeling for Beauty and Art. And yet, by dint of toadying and sucking up and being nice, these women have snagged all the best teaching jobs, while Paglia has laboured alone and unheard at the Philadelphia College of Art. Her ethnicity, her integrity, her innocence, her refusal to play the academic game, have kept her back while less talented ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... comes from Iago’s half-jesting comment to Desdemona, after she presses him to think of something nice to say about her: ‘O gentle lady, do not put me to’t,/For I am nothing if not critical.’ For all its forbidding pauselessness on the page, If Not Critical catches something of the movement of a speaking voice and the demands it makes on the ...”

“... 2000, the same year as Mankell’s similarly themed The Return of the Dancing Master, so it’s a nice touch that Hole is briefly taken off the case and sent to fester in Wallander’s territory, a.k.a. ‘some godforsaken place in Sweden’. ‘In the detective story,’ Auden writes in ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, the setting should be the Great Good ...”

“... Craig has been signed up for the American remake of the first film, which will be directed by David Fincher. The quest to find Lisbeth Salander took on Scarlett O’Hara proportions; the role has been filled with attendant fanfare by Rooney Mara, who was introduced to the world in Fincher’s last movie, The Social Network. (It will be interesting to see ...”

“... or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion from ...”

“... For the modern scholar, the consolation is a good score in the latest research assessment, some nice trips at someone else’s expense, and a few reassuring footnotes in the publications of other, reciprocally unconsoled rummagers. This is what’s called disinterested scholarship; but it occasionally breeds internecine quarrels that can seem anything but ...”

“... reality receives the occasional anguished acknowledgment in the letters. ‘You kindly say it is nice to have a 2nd home,’ Fitzgerald wrote to her daughter Maria in 1974. ‘I wonder if you feel you have a 1st one! But we love you very much and that must count for something.’ To Carduff in 1987 she remarked that ‘on the whole I think you should write ...”

“... lot of baloney’ the latterday gossip that Rudy was a homosexual, angrily insisting: ‘He was a nice, normal human being.’ But he confirmed that – except when Rudy was with Natacha Rambova, the woman who became his second wife – Rudy seemed content with a passive stance when it came to actual sex. Not that we should trust Ivano as normalcy’s ...”