Search Results

“... has traditionally disliked spending money. Politics has always been dominated by a tenant farmer mentality hostile to taxes and state intrusion. Dame Sibyl, Sark’s greatest publicist, married an American and made several tours of the US, giving her radio audiences the impression that Sark was a feudal state over which she reigned supreme. This has ...”

“... with flame-throwers – or, in the more palatable scenario of crop-substitution, to pay off the farmer to grow cabbages or pineapples instead. The problem is all the places you can’t walk into. The Burmese poppy crop is controlled by powerful para-military armies like the Shan United Army and the Kuomintang. The bulk of South American coca is grown not by ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... man called Gary Gardner began to wonder about the case. He was a retired – bankrupt, in fact – farmer, cropduster and descendant of pioneers and railroaders; bowlegged, corpulent, straw-hatted and outspoken, he had acquired a reputation in the Tulia area as an eccentric and enthusiastic troublemaker after suing the Tulia school district over its new ...”

“... Even mainstream liberal opinion aligned against the Rides. The respected TV journalist David Brinkley commented on the NBC evening news that the Freedom Riders ‘are accomplishing nothing whatsoever and, on the contrary, doing positive harm’. Public opinion surveys showed that most whites – North and South – viewed them negatively. In a ...”

“... Phillips loved to talk and tell stories, which form the basis of the book. His father, a tenant farmer, was, Phillips told Guralnick, ‘the greatest sculptor of the soil I’ve ever seen … The way he was with people, the way he was with animals, the kindness he showed to others, the expectations he had of himself … He knew the soil. He knew mules. I ...”

“... might have issued from Christ’s breast.The consummation imagined here is tellingly related in David Kennedy’s astute essay on Prince’s ‘Portrayal of National Bodies’ to a notebook entry the poet made in 1950, which details a bored church elder haunted by a ‘dream of naked man, opening his arms, receiving love and death upon his bare ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... Women Writing about Money (1995) gets more thoroughly into the topic than a biographer can, and David Nokes provides even more insights than Tomalin into (say) Austen and legacy-hunting. In fact Tomalin’s considerable strengths are surely of another kind – to do with her modern, matter-of-fact tone of voice and her narrowed focus on Jane Austen as the ...”

“... as a goitre prophylaxis was proposed again in 1898, 1909 and 1912. In 1911, the US researcher David Marine announced that he had used iodine to prevent goitre in freshwater trout, though he stopped short of endorsing an iodine deficiency theory. He thought the element probably counteracted another, goitre-creating agent, much as quinine acts on the ...”

“... in 1932. Eight years later Garner went back to Texas a bitter man, to eke out his days as a pecan farmer; the vice-presidency had broken him. (It was Garner who compared the office to a pitcher of piss.) Rayburn thought Johnson would be making the same mistake, but Kennedy and Johnson between them talked him round. We know Johnson was serious because he asked ...”

“... burnt all her predecessor’s belongings and took possession of the complaisant philosopher-farmer. For many years Riding had lectured the unhappy Graves on the virtues of celibacy, but she now changed her tune; after two solid days in the Jackson bedroom she announced: ‘Schuyler and I do.’ Graves’s second marriage (in 1950) was to the unassuming ...”

“... at being someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.’ In 1937, Frances Farmer, his co-star in The Toast of New York, found him ‘an aloof, remote person, intent on being Cary Grant playing Cary Grant’. By the time ‘Cary Grant’ was fully formed, the man had to give in to his creation: ‘Everybody wants to be Cary ...”

“... But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the paintings he has seen. On paying a visit to Monet’s water ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...”