Search Results

“... as he might be about what constitutes the break between then and now. Conversely, a great many foot soldiers in the free-market brigade would be surprised to learn that they were marching against institutions. It was Friedrich Hayek, after all, who argued that law was a condition of liberty rather than a constraint; that traditional institutions were ...”

“... some of them enormous and luxurious, like the one at Woodchester near Stroud, with its 8500 square-foot principal room. Some were no doubt occupied by Roman officials, but the majority must have been owned by Romanised Britain’s native aristocracy; these people would have spoken both Latin and proto-Welsh – rather like Tolstoyan aristos speaking French and ...”

“... ungulate things in public. Certainly a waterfall is more striking than the parking lot near its foot, but I wonder how it is that visitors can be so sure they saw what they were supposed to and so oblivious of what they were not. Wordsworth wrote in ‘Tintern Abbey’ of those rural places which, in ‘the din/Of towns and cities’, gave him ...”

“... the city of Van, where they lived through the massacres of 1915, then perilously escaped Turkey on foot to settle in Yerevan in Russian Armenia. In 1919 his mother starved to death in the famine. The children were taken in by an uncle, and friends helped to arrange for their passage to America at the beginning of the following year. Gorky always honoured ...”

“... muscle around him. (‘The primary pronoun at staff meetings was always “we”,’ the agent John Ptak says, ‘“We are doing this; we are doing that.” That never happened anywhere else.’) It is sometimes a symphony of bathos nonetheless, as one poor agent, brilliant but fearful, has to pay obeisance to some majorly talented nut-bag or other, just ...”

“... would be a terrible piece of phrasing even if it didn’t tap into a deep pop-cultural memory of John Travolta’s voice.) Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, one of Cioran’s translators, described her job in the introduction to On the Heights of Despair as equivalent to the experience of Jacob, who wrestled with an angel all night long – ‘the translator ...”

“... period. Bevilacqua refers to that period as the Enlightenment. As the intellectual historian John Robertson pointed out in The Enlightenment: A Short Introduction (2015), two distinct conceptions of the European Enlightenment are currently in circulation. According to the first, commonly held by philosophers and public intellectuals, the Enlightenment ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... in September 2014, I was sent to the Marriott Hotel in Glasgow, where the Better Together foot soldiers had gathered to watch the results. From the very first declaration – the bellwether county of Clackmannanshire – it was clear their side had won. Drinks flowed. There was a curry. There were speeches. By 6 a.m. there was dancing. As a ...”

“... to see into the experiences of those around him, an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through ...”

“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... in arguing that it should be turned back in order to save General Galtieri’s face. Even Michael Foot, however, was obliged to dismiss Mr Dalyell from his shadow ministerial post for forcing a division of the House on the Falklands issue on 20 May 1982. One Man’s Falklands is frankly polemical: it makes some valid criticisms but so overstates its case that ...”

“... when they developed and patented steam looms for carpet-weaving: ‘Let each carpet produced by John Crossley be its own traveller,’ the slogan went. The Crossley family bought the house from Samuel Morton Peto, who built the Houses of Parliament and Nelson’s Column before going bankrupt from his investments in the railways: he had to give up the house ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”