Search Results

“... summer, Labour will plunge once more into debating its own history. Not reluctantly, because as Kenneth Morgan points out, the Party ‘has been captivated, even obsessed, by its history’; even more than the Conservatives it is, he says, ‘a prisoner of its past’. Yet the debate will probably be more painful than in the recent past, because it will ...”

“... to see himself as Macbeth, Dalyell relishes the role of Banquo’s ghost. He pestered Harold Wilson with a troops-out-of-Borneo demand which was ultimately conceded. His concern for the unique ecological system of an Indian Ocean atoll led him to save it from the RAF, hungry for a staging post, thus ensuring that such species as the pink-footed ...”

“... see how far the bare bones of the situation can take us in the way of imaginative understanding. Wilson the hero has been an American fighter pilot in Korea, also involved in strafing and bombing missions. Later he becomes a professor of aeronautics at a Western university, marries and settles down. But he is beset by guilt for his part in the horrors of the ...”

“... and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ... diamond rings on every finger proclaim the parvenu.’ An admirer should begin by acknowledging the force of the ...”

“... Bear. Their next relocation made it seem as if Manson’s predictions were coming true. Dennis Wilson picked up Krenwinkel and another Family woman hitchhiking and offered to take them home in his Ferrari for milk and cookies. When Manson heard they’d been to a Beach Boy’s house, he demanded they take him there, along with everybody else. The drummer ...”

“... they sufficient? No political leader can be understood in isolation from his or her opponents. For Kenneth Harris,* unfortunately, the Social Democrat and Labour leaders have only walkon parts in the drama, and frequently, as in the case of Scargill and Livingstone, are presented as caricatures, deserving mention only on the list of victories scored by the ...”

“... Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which the family ...”

“... was a referendum on it he was sure it would be reinstated. In his autobiography, Kind of Blue, Kenneth Clarke says the prison population of Britain has doubled in the last two decades: the short explanation for such growth, in his view, is Rebekah Brooks, and the tabloid journalism of News International. You can wonder whether one reason for Britain ...”

“... In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely – the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago ...”

“... Community; in 1972, when the Heath Government negotiated British membership; and in 1975, when the Wilson Government held a referendum. The referendum, in which 64 per cent of the voters said Yes, was supposed to determine the question, but long before 1993 the evidence accumulated that it had not entirely done so. For 11 years, Britain was led by a prime ...”

“... of topographer by younger and more brilliant men. Trained by the classical landscapist Richard Wilson, his style was placid, harmonious and orderly. His most successful work was his illustrations to Boydell’s History of the River Thames (1794), where there is an abundance of tranquil vistas and stately country-seats. He was a world away from the drama ...”

“... class, and the hopes of the dispossessed in steerage. The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and ...”

“... villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ruins of the cottage in which he had been born. He also gave him a letter, reminding him of Churchill’s pledge and pleading the Englishman’s right to go home. If Tyneham was not to be released, then he at least ...”

“... not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in Eliot’s later years, the uncompromising seriousness of F.R. Leavis’s ...”

“... by Kingsley Amis, Four Quartets, Brideshead Revisited, Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Cooper, Angus Wilson, Horizon, architectural Modernism and the Festival of Britain. Just as you think something important is going to be left out it turns up: the bourgeois intellectual love-affair with France, the nascent aspirations towards internationalism in art. It is all ...”