Search Results

“... of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In ...”

“... for the Fourth and Fifth Man. It is this story which is at the root of the accusations against Sir Roger Hollis, for when Blunt was turned up – not through Golitsyn’s efforts – it was already gospel among MI5 mole-hunters that there must be a Fifth Man somewhere. More alarming still was Golitsyn’s allegation that the KGB had so penetrated the Labour ...”

“... of Spion Kop. The most dangerous wars are successful ones. Victorious generals and their political masters prefer to delude themselves by taking the credit for winning, and so construct fictional accounts of the war, imputing rational calculation where none could have existed. Such is the hair’s breadth between disaster and triumph that spite, recrimination ...”

“... Bacon poured scorn on their ‘daintiness and pride’, while the Elizabethan humanist Roger Ascham worried about the effects of a mathematical life on good manners: ‘all Mathematicall heads, which be onley and wholly bent to those sciences’, were ‘unfit to live with others’ and ‘unapt to serve in the world’; as mathematical studies ...”

“... Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative ...”

“... authors whose names are whispered among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have ...”

“... construct atomic weapons and new bombers and missiles to carry them. So they and their political masters needed regular press support for their expansion by explaining that necessity in simple terms to the mass of voters. Essentially​ , this was the role Pincher played for the next thirty years, and a fairer or more transparent world would honour him with ...”

“... least English) higher education. The provenance of their authors could hardly be more different. Roger Brown has been, successively, a senior civil servant, the chief executive of the Higher Education Quality Council, and vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University; he is currently professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope ...”

“... a Post-Modern novelist, critic, political theorist, and privy adviser to the world’s great men. Roger Scruton has done the eminent Doctor for Frank Kermode’s ‘Modern Masters’. Alas, Criminale reflects no credit on that worthy series. He is revealed as the most treasonable of clerks, a compound of Waldheim, de ...”

“... verse. Certainly the culture was one that, in theory, adored and admired poetry. No reader of Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse – a collection too large and too rich to be more than mentioned here – can remain ignorant as to how far through Augustan society at large the passion for poetry spread. The major difference between ...”

“... that he had already graduated from Princeton before America entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ...”

“... walking into the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the US Capitol still pass a bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that black people could not be American citizens since they had always been ‘regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race ...”

“... China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of germ warfare by the ...”

“... the great blow’ was Cézanne’s verdict in retrospect. ‘Monet and Pissarro, the two great masters, the only two.’) The Courbet, Manet and Delacroix in oneself, in other words – and no doubt the three remained heroes – would have to be painted out. Sometime in the winter of 1872-73 (I shall return to this later) Cézanne borrowed a landscape ...”

“... public school, with the British High Commissioner as headmaster, and two ‘houses’. Most of the masters preferred the Arab house, whose boys were ‘gay, affectionate, high-spirited and tough, occasionally liable to break out and have a rag and break the skulls of a few Jews or an Englishman perhaps’, while the Jewish house was full of clever rich ...”