Search Results

“... subject: ‘“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!”’ We notice that Holt has begun to turn his deep question in an unexpected direction. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing, because there is, and we’d better ...”

“... making things and selling them. Acton’s is a world in which production, commerce and retail were king; everyone participated in a market economy governed by rational invisible laws, with unprecedented material prosperity the result. Athens, thanks to trade, ‘was a place of opportunity’. It welcomed skilled immigrants and fostered expatriate communities ...”

“... for any man. Now I sit and wait for the third’); one German occupation; two royal visits (‘The king looked more serious than his father and when I stood on the edge of the kerb and shouted, “Wharro, George!” he didn’t look round. He didn’t know it was me’); the Muratti Cup (the annual football game against Jersey, like the Harvards against the ...”

“... was always a bothering thing. 1911. Was that the Wexford Lock-Out or the visit of the English king? It was both, but it was never both in Ireland. When Irish weather stepped up to the plate you couldn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world. One of that legion of Irish summer days that let you down after the promise of morning, like betting on ...”

“... about to act in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), and Menelaus becomes Arthur Miller, ‘king of Sparta and New York’. He brings Norma Jeane back from whatever war ‘Troy’ represents in the 20th century, only to find she has evaporated, as magical figments should. The non-phantom Norma Jeane, meanwhile, saw no action of any kind since she was ...”

“... and was among those executed after the rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”

“... friend is ‘an impassioned and eloquent expert’, full of stories about Quetzalcoatl, the god-king who takes the form of a plumed serpent; about wonderful coyotes and jaguars. ‘Mr Palomar’s friend pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.’ At the same time a group of schoolboys is being taken round the ...”

“... good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what ...”

“... the mediocre musical written by Lerner and Loewe where, ‘for one brief shining moment’, King Arthur had enjoyed absolute power over his knights. (And Sir Lancelot over their women.) You might think that an invocation of mythical yet absolute monarchy would put bow-tied American scholars and editors on their guard. But you would be dead ...”

“... There was once a king who was troubled by all the misery he observed about him. So he summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into its causes. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and reported back to the king that the cause of all the misery was him. So runs Bertolt Brecht’s parable of the founding in 1923 of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a centre for Marxist studies endowed by a wealthy German capitalist ...”

“... the kings of Northumbria and Mercia and East Anglia and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when King Alfred ...”

“... one of my feet or maybe even my neck.’ And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete ...”

“... Tudors rather than Henry VI gave us that incomparable monument of late medieval English Gothic, King’s College chapel, but the Protestant Reformation made it difficult to exploit a royal saintly cult. After some spirited ceremonial experiments in the opening months of the reign of Henry VIII’s son Edward, another boy-...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”