Search Results

“... filled in the means-tested application form. We would have to make a case every term and have our name written down in ink at the end of the typed list, as if our parents were completely absent from all decisions and all procedures. You felt guilty at both ends of the argument: guilty for not having the form and guilty for resenting your parents for not ...”

“... and 119 kg, and could run a hundred metres in 11 seconds. Lomu died in 2015; when I searched his name online, some of the top results were: ‘He was IMPOSSIBLE to stop’; ‘Jonah Lomu Smashing People for 4 Minutes’; ‘Like a Train Smash’. Other national federations took the hint, and players got bigger, faster and stronger. By 2019 South Africa’s ...”

“... surname, English chalk running through it like lettering in Brighton rock), ex-musician, ex-name photographer, current burnout, lucks onto a great scoop: a supposedly dead Murdoch substitute being pleasured by a lively Duchess of York clone. Nobody wants to know. Canary Wharf yawns in his face. It’s the end of the road for Denny, seaside exile in West ...”

“... the pieces seemed to fit perfectly. But modern scholars are no longer convinced: for example, the name Robert Hood and its variants was not uncommon in the Wakefield area through the 13th and 14th centuries, but the only Yorkshireman of this name ever known to have been outlawed was ‘Robert Hod, fugitive’, who forfeited ...”

“... of ‘ten or thirteen’ (a little late in the game by my lights) and knows the lyrics to every Billy Joel song by heart (a detail rarely omitted, for some reason, when he is profiled in the press). After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which as her top wonk he took personally, Sullivan and colleagues started a think tank called National Security Action, which ...”

“... Whitstable and Hastings into locations for second homes and fashion shoots, even the status of the name Jack.’ He went on: The current taste for English things, it is hard not to notice, has happened at the same time as the rise of Euroscepticism, and the emergence to national prominence of Ukip and the British National Party. The new sellers of Englishness ...”

“... in Otto Preminger’s Laura, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, the recorded confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity). There’s also a nod to Camus’s self-confessing narrator in The Fall. In the context of the French crime novel, however, it appeared wildly original. Instead of sub-Maigret detectives propping up an unchanging social ...”

“... magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of foundations in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against Soviet totalitarianism. One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre operation to ‘counter Communism’ by trying ‘to break down ... doctrinaire thought ...”

“... examiner and sat on committees. I had become the person I once impersonated. There were still Billy Liar moments: doodling in meetings, dreaming up titles for novels, imagining the present as prelude. But the masquerade was over. What I did was who I was.Then, two years ago, things took a turn. A viable application for a big research grant fell at the ...”

“... of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and his cohorts seized the town for fifteen months in the name of free love, anti-feminism and publicly funded music (D’Annunzio later described him as a ‘beloved comrade in arms’). By 1920 Teruzzi was back in Milan, one of more than a million veterans adrift in a nation that had little use for them, living with ...”

“... most high-spirited of stories? (‘ “I say you fellows, it’s a lark, isn’t it?” chortled Billy Bunter.’) Drotner doesn’t seem to have studied her material with sufficient attention to grasp the characters of the boys – or, come to that, the names of all the girls, once she reaches the equivalent female papers, the School Friend and the rest of ...”

“... taxi-driver; the exotic and much fêted André Previn was plain ‘Mr Preview’ – the name by which, he told McCann, he is still known to many London cab-drivers more than twenty-five years after appearing on the show. This is the levelling down on which the British like to pride themselves, that sometimes aggressive way in which egalitarianism is ...”

“... I first started writing headlines 70 years ago, but in my time we did not indulge in first-name familiarities on the lines of ‘Sidney Goes to the Gallows’ and ‘Ann (90) Fells Burglar.’ This first-naming of all and sundry is the curse of the age and is rendered no more acceptable by the fact that nurses and policemen do it. I ...”

“... the executive suite. In 1965, the penthouse still had enough ‘unheard-of glamour’ to lend its name to a new men’s magazine. There’s a great deal to admire in Bernard’s integration of evidence of various sorts, from building regulations and operator manuals to high literature, into a shrewd and versatile account of the transformative effect of the ...”

“... some of which were multistorey ‘crack malls’, complete with smoking rooms and even crèches. Billy Joe Chambers directed his sales teams to make the addicts ‘feel good’ about spending welfare money needed for diapers or formula on crack. The ways cultures either adapt to new intoxicants, integrating their effects into cohesive rituals, or fail to, so ...”