Search Results

“... They have no support from the state.’ Since the crown passed from the exiled Russian aristocrat, Alexander Alekhine, in 1946, only the iconic Bobby Fischer has wrested it from Russia. Chess is now practised by ominously boring people (like me) who recall classic encounters from centuries ago (Russell’s favourite is the so-called Pearl of Wijk aan Zee, a ...”

“... the one who in the end did most damage to his own country. Like Hannibal long before him, he took Alexander as his inspiration and exemplar, but the great Carthaginian doomed his own city by his victories: Sweden may have been ruined and diminished by the Great Northern War, but at least the country survived. Brilliant commanders are not necessarily ...”

“... destinations to Daniel Defoe and, before him, to the real-life adventure of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk’s cave on the beach of Robinson Crusoe island in the Juan Fernandez group is still shown to visitors; the island is rich in vegetation but its population is reported to consist mainly of hoteliers, tourists and a flock of wild ...”

“... in 2016 and by Vintage in 2018 has since added a new readership to its original cult following. Lee Konstantinou’s astute and sympathetic ‘rereading’ confirms this incremental canonisation.The Last Samurai has two protagonists: Sibylla Newman, fiercely intelligent, combative, but prone to suicidal depression; and her precocious son, Ludo, whom she ...”

“... A and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A century later another celebrated London plantsman, James Lee of Hammersmith, was responsible for introducing the young Sydney Parkinson to Joseph Banks. The son of an Edinburgh brewer and a fellow Quaker of Lee’s, Parkinson had begun to demonstrate promise as a flower ...”

“... reportage of the Kennedy assassination would be, I suppose, the moment when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald during a live television broadcast. These two images typify many of the differences between CNN’s Desert Storm and Stone’s JFK, purely at the level of representational style. The Desert Storm image is abstract, like a display in a video ...”

“... tyranny. Placing prominent men of ‘discernment’ between the electorate and the final outcome, Alexander Hamilton insisted, would hold popular passions in check and prevent a demagogue, perhaps beholden to a foreign government, rising to power. James Madison had a more self-interested objection to popular election. The political power of the South, where ...”

“... and Harwood,’ they said. ‘They’re the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers for a generation. So where did it all go wrong? (Not for the poets, for us.) Raworth’s first proper book, The Relation Ship, was published by his own Goliard Press in ...”

“... or drug taking’, though Finlay seems to have missed the old bashi-bazouk’s description of Alexander Trocchi, at the same event, as ‘cosmopolitan scum’. Even a reference to bad weather, in the form of a ‘great gale’, triggers a parenthetical absit nomen (‘I do not mean Hugh MacDiarmid’). Other Scottish writers were touchy subjects ...”

“... four days before Boris Johnson went on TV to tell the British public ‘you must stay at home,’ Lee Cain, his belligerent head of communications, convened a virtual meeting to discuss Covid-19 messaging. (The Telegraph described the meeting under the headline ‘Anatomy of a Perfect Slogan’.) Until then Johnson had taken a laissez-faire approach: people ...”

“... his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse Harry’ Lee, weighed in with his malicious Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1832), which told a story of base deception focused on Jefferson’s betrayal of George Washington. In 1837, Francis Lister Hawks revived the charges of 1800, denouncing ...”

“... fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few hours while their masters visited each other, and the 22-year-old Melville ...”

“... the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a 12 foot archway. The designer most closely associated with the resurgence of British fashion in the last twenty years broods with cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy ...”

“... Carter’s ‘private opera house of the individual sensibility’. In an essay from 1911, Vernon Lee described the knack of seeing past the individual production: imprisoned in her seat, the spectator could allow her mind to ‘divagate from the music only to the stage; not the literal stage of indifferently painted lath and pasteboard, with its ...”

“... exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, which included Man Ray’s dreamy Lovers, showing Lee Miller’s lips floating above green hills, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup and saucer and Eileen Agar’s objets trouvés – shells, nets and pieces of rusted metal. More than a thousand people went to the opening, at which the performance artist ...”