Search Results

“... me after that because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints ...”

“... a piece about a murder in the San Bernadino Valley – Mormon country. On 7 October 1964, Lucille Miller took her depressive and generally below-par husband, Cork, out for a moonlight drive in their Volkswagen. After a visit to a nearby supermarket, Mrs Miller stopped the car in the middle of the road, poured a can of ...”

“... primarily as a character in someone else’s story. Ever since Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, in which she appears as a lonely spinster with an ear trumpet and an unrequited passion for her fellow novelist, speculation over the closeness of her friendship with James and the motives for her suicide has dominated ...”

“... is: who reads these books and what purpose do they serve? I can imagine looking up a name in James Hart’s fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Updated to include ‘authors not yet born when this book was first begun’, it offers abbreviated commentaries on such newly arrived figures on the scene as Diane Wakoski (1937-; cited ...”

“... people, Maggie. That’s what it’s for.’ Thus Quentin, the tormented Prospero-figure in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play After the Fall. Maggie replies by eating a handful of pills, and the scene then twists and turns between Quentin’s acknowledged guilt and his defiant belief that she would have done it anyway. ...”

“... Women have always written about men,’ Jane Miller remarks in Women Writing about Men (1986),but they have needed to be extremely circumspect about doing so. To read as a woman is to confront that circumspection as a mode of being and a kind of language … Of course, I too want to hear what women writers have been telling us about women ...”

“... Imagine a mixture of Maurice Chevalier (Gallic charm), Max Miller (the Cheeky Chappie), and Don Juan, with a boastful list of sexual conquests on which contesse, baronesse, marchesine, principesse line up with famous literary and theatrical ladies as well as top professionals in another field. The man is also a racing driver, yachtsman, avant-garde theatre and film producer, poet, translator of Elizabethan verse and Christopher Fry, and the inventor of the windscreen-wiper, starlight electric bulbs and château bottling, not to speak of his being a Rothschild ...”

“... Sydney, too, became pregnant. And no less of a Trojan horse. A Henry Jamesian lifetime of manger et parler, and a learned interest in food much enhanced by expeditions to Paris, imparted a stomach which ‘looks,’ he said, ‘like the accumulation of thousands of dinners and luncheons. It looks like a pregnant woman in a cloth waistcoat and as if I were ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned ...”

“... it is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is ...”

“... upon the troubled passage of the Revolution’s reputation across the centuries. The deposition of James left the English with a guilty conscience which they have never shaken off. The men who drove the lawful hereditary ruler from the throne and replaced him by a usurping Dutchman searched vainly for a theory to justify their coup. They might claim that ...”

“... In​ her Mansion House speech in March, in which she outlined her plans for leaving the EU, Theresa May stated that she ‘would not allow anything that would damage the integrity of our precious Union’. We have heard much about Brexit and ‘the will of the people’. Yet the people who voted in the 2016 referendum did not speak with one voice ...”

“... pedagogy.’ The entry ends: ‘Unfortunately, Ireland without its story is merely a member of the EC, the begging bowl our symbol.’ This may disconcert some members of the EC, and some Irish-history revisionists. It is as if there were only the one story: but he has just been explaining that there is more than one, slow ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... BBC producers, all anxious about the way one used one’s voice, but I returned to print when Karl Miller took over at the Spectator, then at the New Statesman, then at the Listener, and then right here. I wrote occasionally for the Sundays and quite often for American journals, so I suppose I am or was one of the race of grubbing professors, though a very ...”