Search Results

“... what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she ...”

“... He closes by using Hartley Dean and Margaret Melrose’s studies of Luton in 1996 and Yvette Taylor’s of Tyneside in 2007-8 to track how social division and economic marginalisation have done their work. The original case notes and questionnaires are a rich source, but also a tricky one. The sociologist Mike Savage has suggested that interview ...”

“... hardball over money. Bollettieri felt cheated, and Becker’s otherwise fanatically loyal wife, Barbara, sympathised: ‘That was wrong, what he did to you, and I hope it doesn’t happen to me.’ Bollettieri makes money from coaching top-ranked professionals, but he also makes money from the less gifted pupils who attend his academy. Agassi and Seles ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his beliefs, his ...”

“... loves a ‘battle with the waistband’, something that gave her hours of fun with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to number ...”

“... later England were dumped out of Euro ’92 by Sweden. The Sun put the England manager, Graham Taylor, on the back page with a turnip for a head. In 1994 England failed to qualify for the World Cup. The most important managers in English football were Scottish. Manchester United were beginning their winning streak under Alex Ferguson (from Govan); his ...”

“... Alfred Wolfsohn is ‘Amadeus Daberlohn … a voice teacher’. Charlotte Kann (left) and Barbara Petzel discuss Barbara’s love life Salomon’s parents were well-to-do. Her father, Albert, was a surgeon and oncologist; her mother, Fränze Grunwald, decided to become a nurse soon after her younger sister’s ...”

“... Shockers in their own day, Owen, Blunden and the rest were canonical, now. It is to them that Barbara looks, in Put out more flags, when she wants a model for what she imagines will be the wartime role of her feckless brother Basil Seal: ‘She thought of him in terms of the war books she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern ...”

“... she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible futures for feminism, brings her ...”

“... whose earliest prominent figure, the glamorous and elusive Baron Gottfried von Cramm, married Barbara Hutton and had an ambiguous relationship with the Nazis; his tenacity and panache had a lasting influence on the game, apparent not only in Boris Becker and Michael Stich (who resembles von Cramm in the sheer fluency of his strokes) but also in the ...”

“... ambitious grifter. Yeats had been present at the play’s notorious premiere in Paris in 1896, but Barbara Wright’s translation for the Themersons was its first appearance in English. From the opening word – Ubu’s exclamation ‘Shittr!’ (‘Merdre!’ in the original) – Wright captures Jarry’s freewheeling slang perfectly. In its ...”

“... of the book, which is written in a racy style much like that of the Sunday Supplement memoirs of Barbara Castle, who gave him his job at the Supplementary Benefits Commission and whom he much admires. Donnison clearly found the world of ameliorist intellectual politics enormous fun. He is the archetype of the interventionist academic. He has sat on a host of ...”

“... much of the detail through encounters with the experts, such big hitters of the shark world as Barbara Block, ‘the unquestioned queen of shark tagging’; the lemon shark maestro, Sonny Gruber; Boris Worm, doyen of fisheries conservation ecology; and Jeffrey Carrier, who has, ‘most likely, viewed more shark sex than any other researcher in the ...”

“... my taste. There was Ida Lupino, who always seemed to be either blind or confined to a wheelchair; Barbara Stanwyck, who seemed to want to be a man and certainly behaved like one; and the wholesome but plain Jane Wyman, who, on account of the plainness and wholesomeness, could be relied on in the end to get her man, homespun values always winning out against ...”

“... was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like Williams, Castle never held the great offices of state, but she wrung headlines and achievements from the most thankless of posts: seat belts and the breathalyser ...”