Search Results

“... yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political reality. The philosopher Charles Taylor has remarked that politics is ‘what’s going on’, or something to that effect. But how the hell are we to know what’s going on, I thought while on my way to the Trades Union Congress? What is going on is in some part what we say is going on: but if ...”

“... Ford (assembly line, plant police), Pullman (model town), Mary Baker Eddy (applied ontology), Taylor (time studies), Watson (behaviourism), Sanger (sex) etc, etc.’ Clearly Gaddis is concerned less with mechanisation per se than with the ‘more pervasive principle of organisation’ which continues to govern ‘automation and cybernetics, mathematics ...”

“... Woman.15 April. Watch five minutes of Have I Got News for You with Nigel Farage the guest and Ian Hislop and Paul Merton their usual genial selves. I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have ...”

“... there was nothing of the austerity ideologue or dour corporate axeman about him. This wasn’t Ian MacGregor flying in to Thatcherise British Steel or tell the miners they weren’t working hard enough. He was a natural diplomat, consulting across the board before making his moves, always referring to Nissan as an equal partner, fluent in four ...”

“... Labour Together was financed by anti-Corbyn Labour donors like the hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and the venture capitalist Trevor Chinn, and donations were published on the Electoral Commission website. Then, on McSweeney’s watch, it stopped declaring them. Documents released to the investigative journalist Paul Holden show that the electoral ...”

“... they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings about Northern Catholics a stage further. In ...”

“... eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences and using no, like, you know, ‘discourse markers’. Although born and raised in ...”

“... career was concerned (he took up the first of a series of distinguished chairs, the John Edward Taylor Professorship of English at Manchester, the following year), and a book of that sort was more widely reviewed in those days than it would be now. But was the publication of that short book, largely about the Romantic roots of modernist poetry and ...”

“... help if we knew where the original bodies were buried. In the first section of Battle-Scarred, Ian Atherton and Stuart Jennings highlight the astonishing scarcity of major civil war burial sites. Two, maybe three, mass graves have been scientifically excavated (they disagree over the identification of a recent big find in York). Parish registers offer few ...”

“... 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the stands … We were playing away at Blackburn Rovers. Ian Wright scored twice. Victory! On the way to the stadium, the players were chanting: “We want our Mars Bars!” I had started to work with them and apply my ideas, particularly as regards nutrition.’ The football played in England today – the speed, the ...”

“... assistance.’ Among those Protestants to whom O’Neill failed to get through was the young Ian Paisley, then making a name for himself as an anti-Catholic rabble-rouser. Paisley, a personal friend of District Inspector Nixon, began by denouncing O’Neill as a sell-out and a Lundy. To many, Paisley was a figure of ridicule, but as the political crisis ...”

“... a fraction of the material available to the editor. Readers may find it useful to have at hand Ian Hamilton’s masterly biography, first published in 1983, if only to provide more continuity, close some of the gaps in the story. He is thorough, lucid and just (admiring and condemning), and it is a bonus that his comments on the poetry – after all, our ...”

“... bloke of a building … cantilevered pot belly poking out over tight trousers’. Its architect, Ian Simpson, has a magnificent and probably iconic light entertainer’s bouffant. His work, too, is on an epic orchestral scale: fittingly brash and boorish, now thrilling, now corny. Like the late Ricardo Bofill he suggests that singular talent and gleeful ...”

“... Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott protégé who declared not long ago that if he was ever cut in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of Brighton rock. Could all this add up to a vindication for those who thought that Tony ...”

“... Jean (his sister) Forbes, plus the colourful Abe Segal, and fine Davis-Cuppers like Bob Hewitt, Ian Vermaak, Trevor Fancutt, Owen Williams – as well as the best of them, Cliff Drysdale. The connection between tennis and politics is hinted at in the extracts about and by Arthur Ashe, but there is also something to be said about the German game, whose ...”