Search Results

“... right, while Giscard d’Estaing is centre right and seeks to appear as if he were centre left. Foot is too nice, so much so that he is the nicest prime minister we will never have, but Healey is not nice enough and his past bullying of the unions has lost him their enthusiasm if not their support. Foot is ...”

“... and themes which will make enough noise to fill up the silence of the great open spaces. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace is a ‘Western’ novel executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony ...”

“... much. As proof, he cites its adherence to an old tradition. On every 19th of April, the date of Paul Revere’s ride, the town’s great bell rings out and ‘the people of the town awaken suddenly in their beds, and listen, and remember.’ The bell was made by Paul Revere, and what they allegedly remember is the ...”

“... throughout in rapt contemplation, absorbed in some inner holiness. Cardinals kissed a hand and foot, bishops kissed a knee and foot, while mitred abbots were confined to a foot. Pacelli was nothing if not a respecter of hierarchy. He wanted no colleagues, prized his solitariness, ate ...”

“... rabbinic writings to confirm the truth of the Gospel portrayal. Emil Schürer, Ferdinand Weber, Paul Billerbeck and (later) Rudolf Bultmann and Joachim Jeremias used selective quotation from the rahbinic writings to show that the Pharisees were petty legalists and ritualists. Those who combated this type of argument by more comprehensive and representative ...”

“... Paul Lafargue drove Engels to despair. Negotiating with other French socialists over the founding of the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1881, he committed ‘blunder after blunder’ and nearly wrecked the whole thing. In 1889, charged with organising the founding conference of the Second International in Paris, he was making ‘a terrible hash of things ...”

“... consumed by numbers to the exclusion of all else, sounds deranged. The Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erdös, number theorist and combinatorialist extraordinary, eccentric, socially dysfunctional, obsessive, childishly egocentric, helplessly dependent on fellow number freaks to feed him, transport him, put him up and put up with him, was certainly outside ...”

“... by my father, and as close to my father, as I ever will.In his essay ‘Sur le vers français’, Paul Claudel writes that the ruptures characteristic of the primordial elements of thought, the white spaces (‘les blancs’) which for him are the wellsprings of poetry, persist in punctuation marks, even after these spaces have largely been eliminated from ...”

“... he immediately fled. Towards evening, he entered a wood, weary and tired he sat down at the foot of a tree, he opened his little packet, ate his supper, and went to bed. Waking with the lark he felt his limbs numbed by the cold, his hard bed hurt him; then he remembered his father, the ingrate recalled the care and tenderness of the good old rat, he ...”

“... that has prevented the great majority of their potential visitors from ever aspiring to set foot in them. Beyond the Limits gives us little clue as to how an adjustment to these difficult realities is to be achieved – should visas for Venice he auctioned to the highest bidder, for example? Its concluding chapters give more than a hint that the answer ...”

“... that the left’s loathing for him has sometimes led it to overlook his accomplishments. Even Paul Foot had to make concessions in his diatribe ‘Portrait of an Appalling Man’:Patients in LCC hospitals were much better off under Labour; the blind and mentally ill got a much better deal; schools were improved; classes were smaller, teachers better ...”

“... In a 1982 essay called ‘My War’ Paul Fussell described how – at the age of 20 – he became a full-time ironist: one who, by means of his experience in combat, had learned to perceive ‘some great gulf, half-comic and half-tragic, between what one expects and what one finds’. And in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, the soldier poets and memoirists who featured most prominently were those who had found themselves stranded in that same ‘great gulf’, learning firsthand how wrong they had been in their imaginings of what awaited them in France ...”

“... to watch some roadworks: a guy in a front-end loader was laying down a line of inch-thick, six-foot-long steel plates. He would pick up a stack of half a dozen in his bucket, then reverse while raising the lift arms, so that the rectangles fell neatly end to end. It was balletic; it was a card trick; it was industrial. It was totally Richard Serra. The ...”

“... in law. ‘I don’t normally think it’s right for people to be witch-hunted in this way,’ Paul Foot remarked, ‘but in this case the legal process had run its course and the case against these men was overwhelming.’ Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian, concluded that the alternative verdict reached by the Mail (whose editor, ...”

“... half-jokingly inquired soon after the IRA’s ceasefire was announced. One would imagine that Paul Muldoon will be among the Northern Irish poets least directly affected by whatever happens – or doesn’t – in the Province. His poetry has always reflected political events in the most delicate of styles, avoiding overt judgments, sentimental ...”