Search Results

“... he looks at Ford is the elegiac element in his westerns, the way his static camera summons what Andrew Sarris has called ‘his feelings of loss and displacement already fantasised through the genre’. The Old West is a vista of mourning, yet the films are about the funny and mysterious and sometimes savage ways that people survive there and go on to make ...”

“... and moral righteousness to make the world safe for democracy. Like Ferguson, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton begin with the premise that the US has always been an empire. But in contrast to Ferguson’s brief, sanitised account of US history, which leaves the impression that the country’s territorial expansion on the North American continent took place ...”

“... to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic policeman, David Rathband, setting in ...”

“... of Western Europe’s economic recovery and set the long boom of the next quarter of a century in motion, the United States was so much stronger than anyone else that she could assume the burdens of sovereignty herself, at any rate in the Western world. But those days have gone, and there are no new candidates for the post. In these circumstances, Michael ...”

“... Art of Tidying (2017): After each fold, smooth your hand over the whole garment in a soothing motion, before going on to the next fold. While you don’t need to make a sharp crease by running your fingernail along the edge as you would in origami, if you apply a firm pressure, the garment will keep its shape long term … Folding a garment often reminds ...”

“... public reproach. Every so often a press report from Baghdad would highlight the immense slow-motion disaster in Iraq, but for the most part the conscience of the world, and especially that of the American public, remained untroubled. Administration officials reassured themselves that any hardship was entirely the fault of Saddam, and that in any case ...”

“... allege that the Manhunt game influenced the killing. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow. It may be the density of the shadow that fills today’s computer nerds with a thrilling dread. But it also fills them with a kind of experience, and one has to look at the boys and men of the modern military to see where the ...”

“... for the children who would have got most out of Skeaping, was to get the look of a horse, often in motion in bright weather, onto canvas. He was jolly good at it. There is a whole row of his horse pictures at the Royal Academy.* As with Cuneo’s railway trains or Wootton’s Spitfires or, indeed, Sargent’s society portraits, skill is made servant to ...”

“... Committee for Un-American Activities began their hearings into ‘Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry’. Trumbo, with nine others, pleaded the First Amendment, ended up with a citation for contempt of Congress and spent slightly less than a year in a Kentucky jail. When he got out, he and the other members of the Hollywood Ten were ...”

“... one who spent extended periods of time in his company could stand him: ‘a complete cunt’, as Andrew Strauss let slip in the commentary box this summer. That, incidentally, was a word that tended to attach itself to Rudd as well. Accused of describing Rudd in those terms, the former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer replied: ‘I don’t use ...”

“... deliberately excluded from consideration.’ It’s a well-timed question, with Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s advocacy of narrative in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry being so widely and respectfully read, and well-directed too, since it clarifies what’s confused in the Penguin introduction by the editors’ simultaneous ...”

“... edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another context – is either played for laughs or set against the poet’s ‘sun-comprehending’ side. In the ...”

“... Return to the Glens’ is the strongest story in J.I.M. Stewart’s collection My Aunt Christina. Andrew Pringle, a retired barrister and widower, on a walking tour in Scotland, revisits the scene of an early love affair. He pictures to himself the possibility of a lasting reunion with Elspeth, whom he had abandoned long ago when she was a girl. But Elspeth ...”

“... Michael’s brothers and doubtless by Michael as well. They were all into it. They moved in fluid motion, all of them, between sport-as-gambling and gambling-as-extortion; between drinking for courage and drinking through remorse; between thieving for glory and stealing for need; between politicking through strength of religion and faith, and agitating ...”

“... it a good wiggle’. As recounted in his autobiography, the incident unfolds in a laconic slow motion: ‘I realised that it had started firing. No sooner had I noticed this than I observed with dismay that it was firing into my chest. Moving aside pretty sharpish, I walked to the back of the armoured car and lay down.’ Six bullets had gone through ...”