Search Results

“... had assumed that his main problem would lie with the National Security Council Adviser, Richard Allen. Under Nixon, and again under Carter, rivalry between the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State had resulted in the departure of the latter. Haig was determined to block any repetition of the ruthless way he had seen Secretary Rogers ...”

“... Richard Ford​ is sceptical about character. He thinks it changeable, provisional, unpredictable, irresolute and ‘decidedly unwhole’, which makes things tricky for a novelist. You send a man to see his girlfriend in the expectation that she’ll dump him and she tells him how sweet he is. You don’t know where you are with people ...”

“... have big 4x4s. The army press officers have a beat-up silver saloon car. They take us about twenty miles north to a chain of British army camps which have been set up east of the highway. The picknicking Kuwaitis and the Bedouin with their camels have been cleared out to make room. The highway is thick with British military traffic. While we are waiting at the ...”

“... any other enterprise.’ I said I thought they were. He looked at me as if I had taken off with Richard Dreyfuss in the extra-terrestrial chandelier. The head of English gave me some curriculum outlines to look over; they included such topics as ‘Pattern’ and ‘Superheroes’. All the English teachers followed these, week by week, term by term. The ...”

“... Library from the Ministry of Defence only in 1995. Even longer under cover was the map on which Richard Oswald, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and secretary to the British delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1782, marked in red the proposed frontier between the United States and Canada. It was provided for the private use of his British ...”

“... on the façade; inside, visitors could inspect a cannon capable of firing a shell at a target 13 miles away. Visitors came to Essen from all over the world, including China and Japan. Krupp sold arms to the Russians, incorporating innovations suggested by their military technicians, as well as railway equipment to Brazil. He invited representatives of 18 ...”

“... cells, ant colonies, telephone systems, supermarket chains, television and religion. As his hero, Richard Feynman, might have said, Ed Fredkin is a very interesting guy. He is, among other things, a self-made millionaire without a college degree who became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was 35. Fredkin’s ...”

“... sailed for the New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near Dorchester, but subsequently moved and became the leading citizen of the newly founded town of Roxbury, between Dorchester and Boston. He served as treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Company and traded directly with the Native ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... Idea​ for a writer’s retreat: a Russian manor house, hundreds of miles from the bright lights of St Petersburg or Moscow. You can only get there by horse. Don’t go in spring or autumn: the road’s nothing but mud then. You might do the trip in three or four days in summer, or, even better, by sledge in winter, when the frost has hardened the ruts and the snow has smoothed the way ...”

“... and the kind of criticism William Empson pioneered in The Structure of Complex Words and Josephine Miles in Eras and Modes in English Poetry. Hitherto undetected plagiarisms will be uncovered. Teachers will be able to customise anthologies for classroom purposes and – who knows? – the gems of William Oldisworth will be on every civilised person’s ...”

“... popworld of Beavis and Butthead and the fortysomething editors who deify Rosanne Arnold and Richard Nixon on the same page. Editors once made yearly scouting trips up to the North Country, just to avoid getting sucked into the black hole of fad and revisionism. These trips, which took place in the spring and always in a four-wheel-drive ...”

“... branch of the culinary trade has suffered from a strong sense of its own unimportance. Twenty miles across the Channel, the hand that dipped the ladle might be allowed to rule the world. But not here, and if there has been a more dispiriting task than cooking for the ordinary run of British prime ministers, it must have been cooking for the British royal ...”

“... The pivotal event, Luckhurst argues, was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which slashed 4500 miles from the journey between Britain and India but left control of the new trade route out of British hands: Egypt had become the crux of an empire it was not yet part of. Britain acquired a controlling stake in the canal company in 1875 and seven years later ...”

“... mother’s decision in 1945 to move the family from Shillington back to her parents’ old farm 11 miles from town. (She bought it back with her earnings from working at a parachute factory during the war.) Updike and his father hated it there, and he would return to the displacement over and over (and over) in his fiction. Here are the boy David Kern’s ...”