Search Results

“... through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic – exhibited ...”

“... in the hitherto unpublished Aesthetics in Scotland and from the trammels of which the editor Alan Bold cannot cut himself entirely free. Oxenhorn recognises the national character of MacDiarmid’s poetry, but he is seeking to judge it in international terms. This involves a certain deflation of the undeniable element of bombast and overwriting in ...”

“... like to say, started queuing three days early. In the event, the movie’s female lead, Kristen Stewart, posed, according to Metro, ‘for red carpet photos wearing high heels with her sparkling black Roberto Cavalli dress and McQueen belt but changed into comfortable blue trainers before signing autographs’. Everything’s an advertisement. But in Oxford ...”

“... All about Eve, to any Western saloon, booze is the magnifier for all that 30-foot-tall emoting. As Alan Rudolph’s lugubrious 1995 biopic of Dorothy Parker, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, illustrates, it was Prohibition that made boozing an essential act of transgression among the Hollywood crowd of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard ...”

“... This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate. As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular peril of his ...”

“... Taguba as the sites of ‘egregious acts and grave breaches of international law’. Or that Terry Stewart, the former director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, who began the now prohibited practice of ‘dog frights’ in the supermaxes, not only led the Iraq team appointed by the State Department in May and June 2003, but made a brief visit to Haiti ...”

“... subject your own size; affect a style which will readily hold up in your customary social milieu.) Alan Ryan’s Property and Political Theory is thus a bolder venture than it may at first appear. There has been a small handful of serious philosophical or historical works on the nature of property rights published in the last few decades: Richard Schlatter’s ...”

“... Motherwell’. Stobart hovers in the mid-forties on the Sunday Times Rich List (somewhere near Rod Stewart), isn’t keen on going abroad, ‘has no hobbies, doesn’t collect things and has no interest in sport of any form, despite sponsoring Carlisle United FC’. He has a Ferrari he doesn’t drive and a yacht he doesn’t sail. He relaxes on a mechanical ...”

“... Simone shut her eyes and began to play. At 4 a.m., when the set was over, she approached Harry Stewart, the owner and ‘host’, to ask how he liked her playing. Why hadn’t she sung? he asked. ‘I’m only a pianist,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow night,’ Stewart said, ‘you’re either a singer, or you’re out of a ...”

“... must have believed was a safe room. In December 1949, it recorded a conversation between Bob Stewart, the founder of the British CP responsible for discipline, and another member whose family were friends of the MacGibbons. It appears that they were meeting to discuss comrades who might in one way or another present some kind of risk. One of them ...”

“... stand-up days I think Peter might just have liked Jeremy Hardy but would have drawn the line at Stewart Lee. 19 July. Depressed by the latest government privatisation as the NHS-owned company supplying safe blood plasma is sold off to a US firm which is ultimately owned by Mitt Romney and so likely to be asset-stripped and disposed of. The clowns who have ...”

“... pranks and general nuisance-making. Situationist theory ratified and ennobled these impulses. As Alan Marcuson, who was involved with King Mob, put it: ‘The Situationists were the first people ever to provide me with a rational explanation of our irresponsible behaviour and urges.’ Imagining a permanent state of independence without responsibility, both ...”

“... disastrously to Crusader Bible classes.12 September. The last few weeks I’ve been reading Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards, an account of his time serving in the coalition administration of Iraq. He is a courageous man, though it ought to be a depressing book, as for all Stewart’s tireless efforts, returning to ...”

“... but how many musicals are great films? Or, speaking of moments, the killing of Jack Palance by Alan Ladd in Shane is exquisite, but Shane as a whole is a phoney. (But its director, George Stevens, did direct a musical that’s a serious candidate for greatness: Swing Time.) And the problem of evaluating the makers is vastly complicated, as it is with the ...”

“... Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to suppress. The fact that the most successful team in English football was one of the ...”