Search Results

“... of some financial economists has been more clearly performative. Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton’s Nobel Prize-winning option pricing equation of 1973 – which I described two years ago as ‘the single most important breakthrough in the modern mathematical theory of finance’* – didn’t originally describe the market prices of ...”

“... shift from ‘built enclosure’ to ‘environmental management’, from ‘form and hardware to service and software’. This shift could be expressed polemically through such domestic experiments as his own Environment-Bubble (1965), a sort of space pod become Pop pad, but it also provided a means for Banham to think critically about actual urban ...”

“... From here Donne inched his way towards preferment. He became an MP, and found favour with Sir Robert Drury, who took him to France and the Low Countries in 1611-12. Absence always worked powerfully on Donne’s imagination, and according to Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, he had a vision while on this trip: ‘I have seen my dear wife pass ...”

“... could possibly identify. But apart from being evasive, this is inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents the first of his 11 rules of war: ‘Empathise with the enemy.’ Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”

“... to oppose collaboration in the northern and western parts of the country. Pétain’s secret service continued to spy on the Germans, monitoring their radio traffic and passing on decrypted intelligence to the British. Between January 1941 and June 1942 the Vichy authorities arrested 194 suspected German agents and condemned thirty of them to ...”

“... of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids. In his dozens of books of American history – several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one ...”

“... as Collier and Fielding put it; while Harriet Smith’s painful awareness that her suitor Robert Martin hasn’t read the right sort of books (‘I believe he has read a good deal – but not what you would think any thing of,’ she admits to Emma) shows the snobbery behind superficial learning. What the Cry – and by extension polite society at ...”

“... the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of scripture. But, as with the Vikings, who killjoy historians now insist were peaceable farmers minus horned helmets, have we got the puritans wrong?Puritans emerged from chaos. Luther’s wish that the laity act as their own priests, reading vernacular ...”

“... Vegas (1972), the principal manifesto of Post-Modern architecture. There, in a famous opposition, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown distinguished Modernist design, in which ‘space, structure and programme’ are subsumed in ‘an overall symbolic form’, which they called the ‘duck’, from Post-Modern design, in which ‘space and structure are ...”

“... into the part-wrapped nave.If the parishioners of 1730 came to St George’s today, much of the service would be familiar, but the coloured vestments and the larger number of active participants – a priest, an assistant, two or three servers – taking part in the Eucharist would reveal to them the effect of the moves which, from the middle of the 19th ...”

“... On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... elite women – by depriving them of education, exercise and opportunities for public or military service, keeping them mostly confined to the house, marrying them as young as possible, and trying to ensure that they were almost always under the legal control of a male guardian – unless they also assumed that if they did not do so things might get far too ...”

“... her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely ...”