Search Results

“... he claim that the country’s existence was at stake in 1956 when Israel colluded with Britain and France and grabbed Sinai from the Egyptians? It also involves acceptance of the ‘purity of arms’ claim, which, as the Israeli politician Uri Avneri admits, was a myth from the beginning. There was little chivalrous about the atrocities of ...”

“... writing is recognisably clean, clear and colloquial, only occasionally falling into what David Hare calls ‘the Esperanto patter of the higher mysticism’. From the start, Brook avoids ‘personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences, excesses, names of close friends, private angers, family adventures or debts of gratitude’, though there is ...”

“... year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have been eight when Chinatown appeared, and ten or so when David Bowie recorded the song that gives this book its title. Specktor’s mother was a screenwriter whose career was short-lived; later she was a drinker who snarled at her son for asking her to stop. By then she was divorced from his father, who was a leading ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... all queen-consorts: Eleanor of Aquitaine, who rebelled against her husband, Henry II; Isabella of France, who, with her lover, Roger Mortimer, deposed and murdered her husband, Edward II; and Margaret of Anjou, who, given that her husband, Henry VI, was incapable, demanded to rule as regent and then fought tenaciously for the succession of her ...”

“... pre-Fascist Italy, and which crippled that of the French Third Republic. As in Germany, Italy and France, the crisis began to make itself felt before the First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be satisfied within ...”

“... it looked as if Saunière was an agent for some group. This story, the subject of a paperback in France by Gérard de Sède and of a Chronicle film for BBC Television by Henry Lincoln, is the starting-point of the present book. In their investigation of the problems posed by the story, Lincoln and his co-authors begin with the Cathars, and the Cathars lead ...”

“... is the Texan cycling supremo who recovered from advanced testicular cancer to win the Tour de France five times in a row. One condition was imposed: the interview had to be conducted on bicycles. This seemed reasonable. The greatest cyclist since Eddy Merckx could not be expected to sacrifice training time to journalistic chatter. In any case, there was a ...”

“... but of a strong sense of his island’s history. He did not deny Progress its place in England and France, but he was sceptical about its application to Sicily. The indigenous forces, the forces of climate and environment which had shaped the island’s history and formed its people’s character, had strangled and would always strangle the fine schemes of the ...”

“... and took Walt Whitman and Raymond Chandler and Laurence Sterne, who hitch-hiked with me through France and Italy and down to Greece, the four of us with our toes at the utter brink of a strip of dual carriageway a mile beyond the city limits, backed by cornfields, and darkness coming on with a mist of drizzle, took them as he’s bound to take whoever might ...”

“... pacifying Kandahar or pummelling Gaddafi is somehow essential to preserving their way of life. David Nichols has written a slight, narrowly focused book that provides modest but not inconsequential insight into the origins of America’s involvement in the Greater Middle East. His focus is the Suez Crisis, or more specifically, the way Eisenhower’s ...”

“... the scientist (Jean-Pierre Changeux) or even the poet (Yves Bonnefoy). Today, the Collège de France is the stuff intellectual dreams are made of. Academia has displaced literature as the home of intellectual legitimacy. Lévy does not even acknowledge this revolution. He seems aware of the last decade mostly through the neo-humanists and the attack they ...”

“... Adjustment, no matter how comfortable it appears to be, is never freedom.’ David Reisman said that in The Lonely Crowd, a work of academic/pop sociology, published in the US in the late Forties; much read and remarked on at the time, and now forgotten. I looked it up the other day when I was due to say something at the South Bank Centre in connection with the Cities on the Move exhibition at the Hayward ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third ...”

“... No one this time last year would have predicted a victory for the Left in France, yet it is in a sense far easier to explain Jospin’s triumph than Blair’s. President Chirac, elected in 1995 on a promise that he would reduce unemployment, had actually done the opposite; and, faced with the need of his deeply unpopular prime minister, Alain Juppé, to squeeze the economy yet further to meet the Maastricht criteria, called a snap election simply because he feared things would get tougher by the time Parliament’s mandate ran out in 1998 ...”