Search Results

“... is involved. In the 12th century, as Emma Jones writes in her patchy history of London’s water, William Fitzstephen wrote of ‘special wels in the Suburbs’ where the water was ‘sweete, wholesome and cleare’. Water no longer has to be sweet by law, but it does have to be ‘wholesome’, a word that appears in drinking water standards in both the UK ...”

“... to the distant future, writers such as Wells, Edward Bellamy (in Looking Backward: 2000-1887) and William Morris (in News from Nowhere, his rejoinder to Bellamy’s hugely influential novel) sought to vault presently insoluble contradictions. Of course, the same contradictions may well persist into the future, but the shock of the old can enable the awakened ...”

“... we risk the destruction of civilisation. Over the next ten years – under the direction of William Perry, who would eventually become Clinton’s secretary of defense – the US tried to create a new deterrent based on stealth aircraft, smart bombs and other hi-tech gizmos: shock and awe depended on being a generation ahead of anyone else. The results ...”

“... old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his writing. He was a smoker and drinker and on his third marriage. He had had a couple of minor strokes. In two years he’d be awarded the Nobel ...”

“... testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from a number of senior officials intimately involved with the Manhattan Project – was an authoritative counterattack, and it was entirely successful. The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the ...”

“... such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was desperate in his suit for Berenson’s favours, and would have prostrated himself for a petal from the Great ...”

“... awful potency lasted pretty much through the 1980s, powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the ...”

“... an unlikely Ariadne whose name on the ballot for President of the USA in 1980 was Senator Edward Kennedy. When Kennedy blandly welcomed the Poet at the airport in Naxos or Nassau, all he said was ‘Hello! Goodbye! I must be going!’ – and he then disappeared. The Poet was now on his own, with the dangerous knowledge ...”

“... on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy would be joining the household – whether as Marianne’s partner or Warner’s was immaterial. But Marianne’s ...”

“... right-wing policies. It is remarkable in these circumstances that anyone wants to succeed William Hague as leader. What should he or she do? The most obvious strategy is just to hang on. The Conservatives are the official opposition and one of the two major parties of the state. The presumption must be that sooner or later Labour will falter and the ...”

“... found the ‘unostentatious luxury, the atmosphere of culture ... soul satisfying’; Jacqueline Kennedy found the old man to be a ‘kind of god-like creature, in the way he doesn’t fit in with the hurly-burly pattern of our present world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day ...”

“... Vietnam. We see them anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne,’ he ...”

“... getting no time to take breath for les événements in France and the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Then comes the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the drama in the streets at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the butchery at the Mexico Olympics and the brave (now seemingly almost quixotic) We Shall Overcome moments of the first citizens’ movement in ...”

“... to perceive a particular thing to be imperfect, we must have in mind some ideal of perfection. William McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge Disaster’ is famously considered one of the most thoroughly bad poems ever composed. In the winter of 1879 the Tay Bridge collapsed as a train crossed it, killing all the passengers. McGonagall’s poem begins: Beautiful ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”