Search Results

“... argue local politics, state politics, world events, Truman against MacArthur, Truman against the steel companies. They were Truman Democrats, working men, or sons of working men, but they had to admit Truman might have gone too far when he tried to take over Youngstown Steel. Probably the Supreme Court was right when they ...”

“... tide has suddenly turned. The tirade against Brussels from Mrs Thatcher’s former adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, was not well received by the Institute of Directors he was still serving. Opinion polls show and the results of the Euro-elections confirm that outright hostility to the Community is no longer an obvious winner. Mrs Thatcher is suffering both from ...”

“... a negative condition into a positive possibility. ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it,’ John Cage wrote in 1949; two decades later Nauman said, in effect, ‘I have nothing to do and I am doing it.’ Although this formulation isn’t as dire as ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ Nauman does share with Samuel Beckett (another early influence) a ...”

“... wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it reflected a glass roof. You walk into it down a narrowing, steel-walled, waist-high passage, where black oil rises to the rim and stretches out all around you. The tank is neatly tailored to follow the ...”

“... described the Putnam deal as ‘the biggest ever for a woman’, which it may not be (Danielle Steel is more discreet about her advances). A list of the 25 all-time bestselling mystery titles drawn up by USA Today in March listed six Scarpetta titles, with The Body Farm (1994) at number one. In July 1996 Cause of Death was the bestselling hardback novel in ...”

“... done, a minor novelist, of no greater intrinsic interest than, say, Charlotte Yonge, Flora Annie Steel or Ella Hepworth Dixon. She would probably never have published a line had not the men in her life been so needy. It would be nice to think that the biographical effort lavished on Mrs Trollope had resulted in a cumulative gathering and ever-more scrupulous ...”

“... industrial iron for his café-restaurant in the Parc de la Ciutadella; 16 years later he used a steel frame for his concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana, making it the first curtain-wall building in Spain and one of the first in the world. Both buildings sought to establish the progressive nature of the Catalan enterprise, but both are also laden ...”

“... The George Eliot entry does not mention her brother Isaac, Charles Bray, Charles Hennell or John Chapman. Lewes gets just eight words (‘a married man unable to divorce his wife’). Sartre similarly gets no more than a dismissive sentence in the de Beauvoir entry. Beauvoir’s book on her mother’s death is cited, but not Adieux, her farewell to ...”

“... does not cross his mind as he successively nationalises the health service, electricity, gas and steel. Like Devlin, he is a product of that obsolescent concept, the tradition of service. If law is indeed an engine of class oppression, its use as such is indirect and mostly unconscious. Sociologists do not seem to see it as oppressive. Rosalind Brooke’s ...”

“... of with the increasingly tatty heritage park of Fortress Britain. A new book by Richard Mayne and John Pinder shows that the history of the federal idea remains instructive.* For when the Schuman Plan turned Monnet’s ideas about European federation into a proposal for a coal and steel community, Britain kept out of ...”

“... calling for reform and to that end appointed the ultra-respectable public school headmaster Sir John Wolfenden to chair it. When Wolfenden recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults over the age of 21 should no longer be considered a crime the Report was shelved by the Home Office. In the late Fifties, however, the Homosexual Law Reform ...”

“... under the headline the world’s most expensive wife’. ‘It was Dallas and Dynasty and Danielle Steel come to life,’ Wilsey writes – and indeed it was. Steel was a family friend with whom Al had had an affair. ‘This was a 1980s prime-time soap opera drama. Except for the pain.’ The divorce was just the beginning ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... the Italian state built a port on a pharaonic scale to supply coal and iron ore for a giant steel mill. The steel mill was never built and the port lay idle for years until enterprising northerners equipped it to handle containers. Gioia Tauro soon became the largest container port in the Mediterranean and the largest ...”

“... of Fiction (1921). Having studied this ultra-Jamesian tract, the bright young Gerald Mills and John Boon determined that ‘viewpoint’ was the main ingredient in narrative and that their romances ‘should always be written from the heroine’s point of view, in order to promote identification and increase interest and suspense’. The ...”