Search Results

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied ...”

“... mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had ...”

“... a belief that Gorbachev appears still to hold. Yakovlev, however, went further and soon took the view that socialism of anything other than the social democratic type was a distortion of ‘nature’, which he defines as the market. These two sets of views, produced within the system but captive to its own inability to change without being ...”

“... what, when she turned writer, Sarraute was to call a ‘tropism’. The term is one that she took from the natural sciences, and when she adopted it she may have been thinking of Proust, who had recently made such apt and witty use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de ...”

“... Ceausescu was having built for himself when he was deposed and then killed in December 1989 – I took the train up to the Jiu Valley. It jolted and squealed north to the city of Brasov, then west through the Transylvanian Alps to Petrosani, the central town in the Valley. It was after midnight when we arrived; a late-night kiosk had some bread and ...”

“... the industrial and labour correspondents – itself a cause of bitter comment from a group that took pride in its morning bleariness – to demonstrate, with the help of charts and coloured markers, how the markets were moving inexorably against deep-mined – and relatively expensive – British coal. The pre-MacGregor Board would never have jeopardised ...”

“... a favourite method in the 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘No man,’ according to Byron, ‘ever took a razor in hand who did not at some time think how easily he might sever the silver cord of life.’ The advent of the safety razor inhibited such morbidity. It is unlikely that anyone has ever held a Bic disposable in his hand and contemplated severing the ...”

“... it helped him, professionally or personally, being caught between worlds to quite that extent.He took early retirement in 1979, after working for the same employer for thirty years, and died suddenly in 1983. He was the age I am now. Most of my memories of him are from Hong Kong and that emotional complication is one of the reasons I don’t like going ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... John Keegan’s book is about the principles, strategy and tactics of warfare at sea and their evolution as it is exemplified in four great battles, Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and a critical period in that long struggle the Battle of the Atlantic. It is a strangely mixed book, some parts being quite remarkably good and quite unhackneyed, others dealing with matters that have been handled again and again, and doing so with no great originality ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... When, for instance, the tower and spire of Chichester Cathedral collapsed in 1861, Sir Gilbert took charge and ‘stationed my son Gilbert’ on site to sort out the debris. Scott superintended much of the rebuilding and when all was complete five years later, set up the weathercock on the new spire – during a thunderstorm. Scott also looked after his ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... The three universities of medieval foundation were essentially undergraduate colleges, but, as John Durkan has shown, Scots as students and teachers had roamed abroad since the 15th century to the higher faculties of the Northern universities – some to England, but far more to the Continent. While they were to be found in significant numbers from Louvain ...”

“... writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”