Search Results

“... I’m driving in South Central Los Angeles in my rented Ford, which is calculated, with its icing-sugar bodywork and sappy sprig of an aerial, to lose itself in the fitful lines of flaking write-off and deckled insurance jobs. My chrome is see-your-face; theirs is in-your-face. It’s a loweringly humid afternoon on which four white men are standing trial in a city courthouse accused of depriving a black man of his civil rights, especially the right not to be batoned following traffic violations ...”

“... He had picked his Secretary of State from among the small group of men who had made the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy. Such a person could hardly be expected to accommodate himself to the atavism of the Radical Right. Haig must have thought that the situation was tailor-made for him. Under Nixon’s Presidency he had become Kissinger’s ...”

“... sheer unlikeliness of what he’s up to: Einstein bent the Universe     To make war obsolete. Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush     The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced     The new age with a tweet.The butcherbird is in fact native to Australia, but that doesn’t stop Hughes punning on its name in his off-kilter ...”

“... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... of incredulity and bewilderment. One thinks, for example, of the pardon granted by President Ford to his predecessor in 1974: Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States . . . do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offences ...”

“... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the ...”

“... him in Berlin and admitted that he was very much a product of that culture. He cited lyrics from a Richard Tauber song from Lehár’s Land of Smiles that had remained with him all these years – ‘Always smiling and always cheerful’ – and implied that this was part of his own persona too. His new book is much like that. The darker side of Modernism is ...”

“... after a feminist revival in the Seventies and Eighties, Richardson seems destined to remain what Ford Maddox Ford once called her – an ‘abominably unknown contemporary writer’. Many factors have contributed to her anomalous position in literary history, but these letters underscore the significance of her rejection ...”

“... race for a second term, and Nixon eluding impeachment by a hair. The two decent men who followed, Ford and Carter, seemed trapped in a torpor of virtue, trying hard to restore integrity to the Presidency by offering the nation homilies in place of the decisive policies it was demanding. It is around these themes of the 20th-century Presidency in crisis that ...”

“... Auster’s selection of Apollinaire’s work in his Random House anthology includes versions by Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Paul Blackburn, James Wright, Dudley Fitts and William Meredith, as well as Padgett, whose translation of ‘La Petite Auto’ first appeared there, and is now reprinted in this excellent selection. Padgett’s versions ...”

“... Olympic sideshows and secure arms trading. And much of it Chinese owned. Jarman’s title recalled Ford Madox Brown’s painting of 1855, depicting the artist and his wife as emigrants shipping out to Australia, part of an economic migration of around 350,000 disaffected British citizens. Posing his partner in a freezing Hampstead garden, Brown managed to make ...”

“... After many vicissitudes the Library of America was launched, under the direction of Daniel Aaron, Richard Poirier and Jason Epstein, who had worked with Wilson on the original abortive project. These people and their associates raised $600,000 from the Ford Foundation and then $1.2 million from the National Endowment for ...”

“... floor was the only surviving model of Fuller’s Dymaxion car, a paramecium-shaped tricycle with a Ford V8 engine. Beside it, a black and white video showed the Dymaxion car slinking past a row of box-like Depression-era Fords and sidling with UFO-like ease into a parking space its own exact size. Fuller intended to add what he called ‘jet stilts’ to the ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of ...”