Search Results

“... Denis Diderot, the hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s new novel, has one niche in the English language with ‘esprit de l’escalier’, his only entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one’s way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room ...”

“... Balliol also produced a string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray ...”

“... approach extended beyond public relations to matters of substance. Indeed, the Labour chancellor Denis Healey described the quest to identify policy in Thatcher’s first election manifesto as like ‘looking for a black cat in a dark coal cellar’. Not only did Thatcher become more narrowly ideological, but this intransigence constituted her bequest to the ...”

“... them if it cannot find them. He took this, his ‘overriding thesis’, from the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont, the author of Love in the Western World (1939), and found it ‘corroborated’ everywhere. In loving the goodness of things at rest, Updike, like Frank in ‘Natural Colour’, also wants to disturb them. It is usually morbid to speculate on ...”

“... are no bullfights in Hemingway, there is no violence in Faulkner,’ as Kenneth Burke once told Denis Donoghue: it’s all text; and against such a claim there can be no appeal. (The idealist can always sweetly point out to Dr Johnson, nursing his foot, that he never disputed that the idea of a stone involved the ideas of ...”

“... principal demands is marriage to the French princess Catherine, by whom he hopes ‘between Saint Denis and Saint George’ to ‘compound a boy, half-French, half-English’.In the 1590s, as Tudeau-Clayton notes, Shakespeare lodged in parts of London favoured by French migrant workers and refugees, and in 1603-4 stayed in the household of the Mountjoys, a ...”

“... supply as a part of la patrie that had somehow been taken over by outside forces. ‘For us,’ Denis Cohen, the communist head of the CGT until 2003, told me, ‘energy is like culture; it’s not a private good.’ It was puzzling. From this side of the English Channel, it had seemed clear enough: although some shares in EDF have been sold, and the ...”

“... been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks. But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and ...”

“... influence inside Labour peaked with the deputy leadership election in 1981, which he lost to Denis Healey by 0.852 per cent. One of Benn’s supporters said it was ‘the most intense power struggle I have ever witnessed’ (though he was writing before the great clashes of the Corbyn years). Despite Healey’s victory, the Labour manifesto for the 1983 ...”

“... smoke travelled from there into the common areas and the stairwell. In Flat 111 on the 14th floor, Denis Murphy, 56, dialled 999 and was told to stay inside his flat and that firefighters would soon reach him. He called his brother at 1.30 and left a message saying there was black smoke everywhere. People could have made for the stairs at that point, but they ...”