Search Results

“... further in a sepulchral world of its own. Even then, the couple’s only way was probably out: an Edward VIII-plus solution, with its terminal implications for the future of the institution. After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ...”

“... River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the ...”

“... prerogative rights; and it would give rise to ‘republican’ classics in the writings of Milton, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney. Hobbes’s three major works of political philosophy, The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, were designed, Skinner tells us, in direct opposition to parliamentary and radical writers. As the conflict between Parliament ...”

“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... to J. Edgar Hoover, [Harry] Cohn has the finest surveillance system in the USA. The director Edward Dmytrk probably got it right when he refused to give names and honourably served his prison time and then – surprise! – became employable again by testifying against his former comrades. Way to go, Eddie. Clancy’s narrative voice is first-person ...”

“... morning: blue sky, bare trees, every detail plain.4 March. I am rereading (or reading properly) James Stourton’s book on Kenneth Clark. I hadn’t realised how apposite for these days is Yeats’s quite hackneyed ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ … The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full ...”

“... New styles of architecture, new styles of advertising, also signalled the change of heart. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, became the presiding genius of Madison Avenue; he made cigarette advertising sexy, and persuaded women to smoke Lucky Strikes. The age of euphemism gave way to the age of dysphemism; sex, suppressed by the matriarchs, came out ...”

“... Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that Gibbon conceived the idea of the Decline and Fall; and Rothesay is not an island. It would be wrong, however, to allow pedantic irritation to mar one’s enjoyment of this wonderful compendium of ...”

“... named for Jimmy Angel, the bush-pilot who should, from his photograph, have been played by Edward G. Robinson. There he is, hard-bitten and broke as usual, cooling his heels in a Panama hotel lobby, when one J.R. McCracken sidles up with news of a river of gold in Venezuela he wants to be flown to. They get there and pan out a quick 75 lbs. McCracken ...”

“... railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems the War turned into momentously general truths, as in an echo of Empson: It’s not diseases, but the void that kills, The space, the ...”

“... haunted by the knowledge that his methods as thinker and prophet as much resembled those of Uncle Edward Ponderevo, promoter of the world-famous patent medicine Tono-Bungay, as they did those of Plato and Marx. For one thing, did he not, just like Uncle Ponderevo, construct his campaigns around slogans? And do not the slogans – ‘the competent ...”

“... John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to join him in a scheme by which Kidd was to be sent after the pirates in a vessel provided by the partners and called the Adventure Galley. Kidd had letters of marque to enable him to take enemy ...”

“... alienated large numbers of patrician supporters. So crowd action contributed to the expulsion of James II in 1688, to the overthrow of Godolphin’s Whig administration in 1710, and to the resignation of the Duke of Newcastle in 1756 and of Lord Bute in 1763. Much of this analysis will be familiar to experts in the field, but Gilmour’s lucidity, pungency ...”

“... photographs, objects and clothing relating to pregnancy from the 15th century to the present, Edward Burne-Jones’s Annunciation (1876-79) shows the Virgin receiving news of her pregnancy from the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any ...”

“... child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My ...”