Search Results

“... in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold’s funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, ‘the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two.’ Posterity has found it very possible. And, richly informative as Slater’s biography is (he has been at it ...”

“... or simply informative they were generally more stoical than bellicose and often humorous. David Welch’s account is based on the Central Office of Information archive in the British Library, with occasional excursions beyond it, and he considers a wide range of material. It was in the summer of 1939, when war seemed inevitable, that a propaganda ...”

“... yes!’ came the enthusiastic chorus. You might say that the Jerusalem Syndrome began with King David. Once he had escorted Israel’s sacred Ark of the Covenant into the city, having conquered its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the ...”

“... to another room, where they served after-dinner drinks. I found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed – in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.‘The Impermanence of Importance’ would have made a good alternative title for this ...”

“... to get anything done in our cumbersome and bureaucratic democracy. They point enviously to France, where things seem to happen faster, though that isn’t always the case: the TGV goes to Nice, but not yet on a high-speed line, as a result of local protests. Jim Steer is HS2’s biggest fan. The former chief railway planner at the Strategic Rail ...”

“... countless critical treatises, and even apart from his still oddly scandalous paintings at which, David Ellis reports, 13,000 visitors to London’s Warren Gallery gawked in the early summer of 1929, he was a figure of extraordinary fascination, even during his lifetime. Paradoxically, then, to contemplate works by the author of that famous critical maxim ...”

“... the century there were Whigs willing to cast envious eyes at the reforming energy of Louis XIV of France, just as a subsequent generation would reveal a sneaking admiration for Napoleon. Goldie remarks of Andrew Marvell, who had welcomed Cromwell as a Machiavellian ruler, that under Charles II he ‘did not wish to unking his prince: he wanted him to be ...”

“... gulf’, learning firsthand how wrong they had been in their imaginings of what awaited them in France. Although Fussell was indulgent of those younger-brother writers of the Twenties and Thirties who eased their war-complexes by engaging in ‘adversary playfulness’ or by filling their works with images of disjunction and collapse, it was evident ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... fought over territories of the past half-century. The war for Vietnam’s independence from France ended in the 1954 Geneva Accords. Then came the war with the US, which reached its height after the commitment of American ground troops in 1965 and ended in the capture of the South by Communist forces in 1975. Yet this postcolonial history, and the ...”

“... general and composed of independent units – one for each occupied country except France, which had two, one for de Gaulle’s Free French and another for those loyal to Giraud – each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... and others to eliminate it from education. Such attempts have been made – most recently in France – and any ammunition for the resisters is welcome. The problem about this kind of history, as Samuel recognises when considering its uneasy relations with Marxism, is that it sacrifices analysis and explanation to celebration and identification. It ...”