Search Results

“... and, ultimately, goes back to Thackeray. The BBC is following up the Diary with its sequel. Simon Crisp, the diarist, is a wet young man about town, a constantly failing trend hound. He is a snob and not very bright. His journal records, unself-consciously and often obtusely, a series of minor defeats and humiliations. Crisp has been rising in the ...”

“... eyed askance or turned askew. Like Dedalus in the Irish National Library, trying to impress A.E., John Eglinton and Mr Best with his theory of Hamlet, the narrator of Nothing Like the Sun throws in lots of local colour, freely kitsched with quasi-Elizabethan compounds and archaic turns of phrase. Moreover, following Dedalus’s example in Ulysses, Burgess ...”

“... of intelligence much easier. In April’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear activities, poor John Negroponte, the national intelligence director, was forced to say: ‘It’s conceivable that they are exaggerating their progress, but I don’t have any knowledge to confirm that.’ The letter, which Washington declared to be undeserving of a ...”

“... Boss is doing more than merely refusing Republicans: he’s gone so far as to offer his support to John Kerry. Other ageing rockers joining him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for saying that they were ashamed of ...”

“... watching him leave the room on one occasion: ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes God.’ Simon Burgess has seized the opportunity to present much the most rounded account to date of Cripps’s remarkable political career. This is a well-balanced and well-written book, developing its interpretation in an accessible and generally persuasive way. It ...”

“... quantified on a 100-point scale. Among the founding fathers of this modern vocabulary were André Simon, Alexis Lichine and A.J. Liebling, whose New Yorker pieces included stuff like the following, about a modest southern French rosé: ‘Tavel has a rose-cerise “robe”, like a number of well-known racing silks, but its taste is not thin or acidulous, as ...”

“... The evacuation of paintings to Wales, just before the outbreak of war. ‘Coventry Cathedral’ by John Piper (1940). ‘Pink and Green Sleepers’ by Henry Moore (1941). ‘Battle of Britain’ by Paul Nash (1941). ‘Saltwood Castle’ by Robin Ironside (c.1955). Sarah Churchill plate design by Duncan Grant (c.1932) from the ‘Famous Ladies’ dinner ...”

“... of Major Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have dreamed of disclosing to LRB readers without ...”

“... interest in the slave trade) for the introduction and persistence of slavery in America. Simon Schama thinks that this silence about America’s founding paradox has lasted far too long. Americans have been allowed to generate their own creation myths, which marginalise the contradiction between liberty and slavery in the Revolutionary era. Take the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It belongs, in fact, in the category of Jack&Ian’s despised astrobiology. Unlike Jack&Ian, Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin are very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the ...”

“... lounge.) In addition to all this, there is an apparently unending succession of books, of which Simon Callow’s ongoing biography is the most monumental, now two volumes in and not even arrived at The Third Man, the 1949 movie that made Welles a myth. Callow’s second volume, Hello Americans, is named after the series of radio broadcasts Welles delivered ...”

“... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...”

“... of Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek, and the technological optimism of Herman Kahn or Julian Simon, post-scarcity anarchism asserts that, given existing and prospective technologies, there are no insuperable natural limitations to the growth of human population, and no forms of scarcity that cannot be overcome by scientific innovation and institutional ...”

“... the bureaucratic compilers of the Report against whom these reproaches are made. To a man, Julian Simon’s independent team of scientists challenge them for the assurance with which they create their mirage of certain doom and offer their own reassuring, though by no means complacent assessments of the world environmental situation. Besides using additional ...”