Search Results

“... British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s huge history of the country between 1945 and 1951. It is difficult for anyone familiar only with the shimmering prosperity of contemporary Western Europe to realise just what it was like in the years immediately after the Second World War. In ...”

“... worth fifty million pounds.’ This is Kenwright’s mother. Ferguson can’t quite believe it: David Moyes was giving me the eyes. For a minute I thought it was a get-up, a performance. Bill’s background was in theatre, after all. It occurred to me while all this was going on that I ought to check Wayne’s medical records. Was there something physically ...”

“... director of operations was Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Its legal draftsman was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, a right-wing libertarian with potent credentials as a principal prosecutor at Nuremberg. It was Maxwell Fyfe who told a Conservative Party rally in 1948 that just as Nazism had crept first gradually and then irresistibly into German ...”

“... or unconsciously aware of and responsive to? What might be thought to be a modern attitude when held by those at home thinking about family members or fellow citizens risking their lives (and killing others) hundreds or thousands of miles away? What is the balance of anxiety and relief in the minds of those on whose behalf distant wars are ostensibly being ...”

“... not the central figure, whether or not he has been hit by ” an arrow. This view was dismissed by David Wilson in his superb colour facsimile of 1985. It turns out, however, that the scene as we know it is the result of a restoration in the earlier 19th century. The areas in which work was done included, crucially, the flights on the end of the missile in or ...”

“... big man. Once one recognises what he is up to, all the paradoxes of his character fall into place. David Willey has written a fascinating book, and has done so from the point of view of an agonised catholic liberal. ‘My faith in God is intact,’ he tells his readers by way of preface, ‘but my allegiance to the Roman Church has been suspended while I ...”

“... of it. If so, the idea proved to be inseparable from the content and drama of a programme that held the entire audience in its thrall for nearly two hours, without pauses or interval. No words were spoken other than those of the narrator in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, and no homilies delivered other than a programme insert bearing excerpts from ...”

“... home from the theatre and instantly became the centre of attention’. The gorgeous past is held in the nostrils, and it was not long before Michael could recognise Uncle Alex’s Montechristo cigars. The most flamboyant impresario that the British picture industry had known, Alex was the only man who had ever conquered the American market (with Henry ...”

“... front the horizontal bands in the beard rhyme with the interlaced fingers of the clasped hands, held away from the body to form a shape in space that seems charged with a mysterious spiritual force. There is an overflow from this room into the Egyptian room which follows – notably a case with Babylonian objects of the second millennium BC that includes a ...”

“... in which a liberal or two got hammered were a bonus. From this point of view, a pro-Boer meeting held in Cape Town in January 1902 came right up to the mark. ‘Some of the Sussex Volunteers returned from the front, got on the platform, and – well you can guess what happened. It took the police all the evening to clear up the road, and if there hadn’t ...”

“... death, some humorous, some grimly foreboding. In November 1982 he wrote to Motion about a dinner held for Thatcher by the historian Hugh Thomas and attended by writers he thought she might admire (Larkin, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett, Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Powell, among others), which Larkin had found tough going. ‘The Thatcher dinner was pretty ...”

“... of the enterprise ultimately rests, and that it is only in his head that the complete formula is held, Truffaut cast himself as the abstracted but notably phlegmatic Ferrand. Today, 12 years after Truffaut’s tribute to cinema – the grind of production and the pleasure of spectatorship – the urge to expose the process of film-making has grown more ...”

“... David Lockwood is the sociologist’s sociologist in the same way that Ken Rosewall used to be the tennis player’s tennis player: he’s the one the other pros turn out to watch. But you need to know the fixture list. To switch to an older metaphor, he is apt not only to hide his light under a bushel but to hide the bushel as well ...”

“... of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract Expressionism, the movement which forms the nucleus of the exhibition. The exclusion of Chuck Close, accompanied by the inclusion of three large works by Jonathan Borofsky, can ...”

“... appalling effect. The pronounced if uneven enlargement and sophistication during the 1930s of what David Edgerton terms Britain’s ‘warfare state’ has been extensively studied from a variety of angles, most recently in Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45, which includes an authoritative account of the evolution into doctrine of the belief ...”