Search Results

“... there was a great deal in the way of conspiracy and intrigue that ought to be told. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a great practitioner of the art in the last century and in this short, sparkling and committed essay Christopher Hitchens writes in somewhat the same tradition. He is a radical British journalist living in the United States who is married to a Greek ...”

“... queen’s consent. It was time for the establishment to bring up the big guns. On 1 October 1955, Anthony Eden informed the princess that the cabinet had agreed that if she went ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights and her income from the Civil List. In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be ...”

“... by slipping through Duveen’s gargantuan legs rather than by standing up to him. The next guest, Anthony Caro, took Duveen on. But Caro is an artist whose rich creativeness is not matched by his critical intelligence, and this has never been more evident than it was in his contest with Duveen. He appears in his naivety to have made two strategic errors: to ...”

“... into money ... when times were hard’. Those children, Elizabeth (Princess Antoine Bibesco) and Anthony (‘Puffin’), both died without cashing in on this legacy. The diary, accompanied by an undisclosed quantity of private correspondence, thereupon passed into other family hands. Mark Bonham Carter, who holds the copyright, permitted Michael and Eleanor ...”

“... his supporters would have us believe. It is difficult not to have some sympathy with Churchill’s blunt putdown: he was ‘a good average colonel’ who would have made ‘a good chairman of a Tory association’. Maybe Wavell deserves better than that, for he was a popular commander, head and shoulders above his contemporaries in intellect and ...”

“... Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan ...”

“... Age detection, have tried their hands at these villages – Allingham’s versions in Suffolk, and Anthony Price’s Duntisbury Royal in Gunner Kelly – but it was Sayers who truly saw the way, and rather than trying to build such a village from scratch, simply borrowed Oxford. In so doing she mapped onto one another the hermetics of the detective story, of ...”

“... relatively short volume is not so much a biography of Crossman – that is to be provided by Anthony Howard – as a portrait of someone he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere ...”

“... is unsigned. Is this sinister machination, or merely a proofreader’s oversight? The second is Anthony Blunt’s account of Tomas Harris, whom he describes as ‘artist, art dealer and intelligence officer’. What wistful, envious or remorseful sense of irony prompted Blunt to remark that Harris perpetrated ‘the ...”

“... British readers will remember that George Orwell, some eighty years later, suggested in his blunt, offensive way that Americans ought to add to this proposition: ‘not counting niggers’. It would be quite wrong, of course, to use Orwell’s sarcasm against Lincoln: there is no doubt that the President always wanted to redeem his black fellow citizens ...”

“... diplomat and a hard taskmaster: descriptions of his tantrums with his staff resemble those told of Anthony Eden, just as loose talk around the Kremlin about assassinating Sadat shortly after his succession to Nasser is reminiscent of Downing Street talk about Nasser in 1956. The author is perhaps most interesting about Russian attitudes to the Chinese. He ...”

“... is that of the close-mouthed and knowing initiate, while Bellow treats Strauss as if he were like Anthony Powell’s Sillery: no more than a don with a number of influential ex-pupils. When Alexandre Kojève is mentioned a few pages later, he is drawn in the same rather lifeless terms as ‘the famous Hegelian and high official who had educated a whole ...”

“... generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James Anthony Froude, whose fulminations about native degeneration in The English in Ireland contrast sharply with his early appreciation of Isaac Butt’s version of Home Rule in the 1870s. (The polarisations after 1886, when the Gladstonian Liberal embrace of Home ...”

“... ends up producing a fable very much in their own image.In​ June 1961, the Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess and his first wife, Lynne, took a holiday in the USSR. In Cold War Leningrad there were echoes for Burgess of his backstreet Manchester childhood. The music of accents: voices that were exotic yet strangely familiar, a chorus of hard-tongued ...”

“... revolution was at stake. There was a more personal anxiety, expressed by Lambert with his usual blunt candour when justifying the 1656 purge of unbiddable MPs: ‘If a Parliament should be chosen according to the general spirit and temper of the nation, and if there should not be a check on such election, there may creep into this house men who may come to ...”