Search Results

“... would be in any lively historical novel, past or present. But the eulogy pronounced by the great Simon Schama, author of Citizens, calls for comment: ‘A dazzling achievement,’ he writes, ‘an extraordinary story told by a phenomenally gifted writer’. This strikes me as over-ecstatic. The Schama connection is a matter of natural and wholesome ...”

“... Coast and Europe descended on the town of Rawlins, fifty miles north of the Colorado state line. James Craig Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, and Simon Newcomb, from the Naval Observatory in Washington, were among those hoping to catch a first definitive glimpse of Vulcan, though others had other ...”

“... of his life Orson Welles weighed 350 pounds. His appetite, though, was not a late development. In Simon Callow’s biography the composer Virgil Thomson reports the 22-year-old actor-director devouring ‘oysters and champagne, red meat and burgundy, dessert and brandy’ immediately before squeezing into a canvas corset to play Brutus in Julius Caesar. Later ...”

“... as it was described, of the population. Lord Mansfield’s judgment in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, who had escaped from his owner on British soil, holding that he could not be kidnapped and returned to enslavement in the Caribbean, provoked much public comment and an increasing awareness of the ‘unfamiliar strangers’ present in the English ...”

“... they couldn’t come back. What would they do?In his LRB Winter Lecture about not going home, James Wood coined a nice word: ‘homelooseness’. ‘Exile is acute, massive, transformative,’ he said, ‘but homelooseness … can be banal, welcome, necessary, continuous.’ I agree that if home is only a train away, exile is too strong a word. It might ...”

“... to the eye – or ear? or are they undercover? That’s not Jan Morris – it’s a writer called Simon Puxley. But it’s a style that this bellelettrist seems to be trying to respond to – not always successfully. This paragraph comes from her essay on Washington DC: Unreality, of course, whether comic, paranoiac or simply bizarre, is an attribute of ...”

“... were suggesting. Monmouth voted that year for the Bill to exclude Charles’s brother James from the throne, with obvious hopes of becoming king himself. He protested that his reason for so voting was that his father’s life was in danger, causing the king to remark: ‘The kiss of Judas!’ Dedicating his play Tyrannic Love to Monmouth, Dryden ...”

“... and opportunity. There is plurality in plenty, and not merely of a superficial sort, in Simon Armitage’s Kid. It is a varied, versatile collection, showing considerable facility in its rhythmic variations and in its generation of often surprising feminine and half-rhymes. Armitage maps a degraded Post-Modern landscape, where the seedy can tip into ...”

“... funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in appearances, as do Clever Hans, Comanche (the purported lone survivor of Custer’s Last Stand) and Anna Karenina’s ill-fated Frou-Frou.Raulff is especially interested in the iconography of the ...”

“... Brought up Jewish and soccer-loving in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper has come to realise that he accepted too easily the myth of Dutch wartime heroism. The result is a long litany of hurt feelings, awkwardly transposed onto the world of soccer. He starts with a snapshot of interwar football, when international encounters were still few and English players enjoyed such unquestioned primacy that one German soccer writer referred to them as ‘a sort of Übermenschen ...”

“... the aristocrat’s traditional disdain for artistic seriousness. According to Montherlant, Saint-Simon left his sentences untidy because to neaten them up would have been beneath him. Waugh was too much of an artist to be that gentlemanly, but he could still dream of what it must feel like to be carefree and at ease. Lady Diana was a key figure in his ...”

“... sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to doing a crossword puzzle – the Norton’s two volumes manage to give readers ‘infinite riches in a little room’. Little, but expanding. Like its ...”

“... Christ insists. ‘Very well, then’: God starts with the terrible ends of Peter, Andrew and James. It almost comes as a surprise to learn that, among those close to Christ when alive, John and Mary Magdalene will die natural deaths. Not so Philip, or Thomas, or Matthew (‘the details of whose death I no longer remember,’ God casually says), or ...”

“... be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to ...”

“... up in palatial style here but so did Spencer’s ex-friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy; Simon Mann, the leader of the attempted mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and Teodorin Nguema, the playboy son of the Equatoguinean dictator, Obiang Nguema, whom Mann was trying to overthrow. It was Thatcher’s involvement as a financial backer of ...”