Search Results

“... rather than the poet whose name appears in the title. The poets are Gower, Marvell, Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth and Beddoes, together with a handful of 20th-century poets from A.E. Housman to Geoffrey Hill. In Wordsworth we are to attend particularly to line-endings and to prepositions, in Marvell to ‘a particular figure of speech’, in Gower to ...”

“... territory. Albert Bierstadt and Blakelock went west; Church and his sometime studio-mate Martin Johnson Heade (whose arresting paintings of impending thunderstorms have been rather fancifully interpreted by art historians as portending the war), went to South America in search of more exotic sublimities: the Edenic Heart of the Andes for Church and the ...”

“... a bullet the day after he asked to read the Newman despatches. Let us further suppose that Lyndon Johnson, finding the plans already in place, had authorised the invasion of Cuba. There would now be a herd of revisionist historians and propagandists, all assuring us that if he had lived, ‘Jack’ would never have allowed the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to do ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate the ...”

“... he thought about these people. It is suggested here (and one of the editors of this translation, Christopher Kelly, has suggested elsewhere) that the conspiracy against Rousseau was deeper than a mere attempt to show that he was a monster and to cast discredit by attributing to him works he had never written or opinions he had never held. His ...”

“... point to the frequency of such reversals in Swift; in his dealings with Esther Johnson and Mrs Dingley, even while ‘establishing for himself a fantasy family in which he might act father, brother, lover or husband as he chose’, Swift ‘was also reversing the old relationship which once made him dependent upon two women’. Reversing is ...”

“... and write about it. There seem to be two positions: a modest one, a way of liking opera, as Frank Johnson does, on the quiet, without shouting about it, and an orgiastic one, where one is cosmically-life-affirmingly-overwhelmed by it, as Bernard Levin is. What we are talking about when we talk about opera becomes an intriguing moral moment. People who talk ...”

“... Richard Nixon is that he never gave up being part of the action and passion of his times.’ As Dr Johnson correctly and humanely observed, a man is not under oath when delivering a funeral oration. But as Kissinger himself brushed away a tear, this ceremony took on more the aspect of a Central Committee interment, where black limousines and dark-spectacled ...”

“... Criticism,​ for Samuel Johnson, was female, her votaries for the most part malicious, ineffectual men. In an early issue of the Rambler from 1750, Criticism is presented as ‘the eldest daughter of Labour and of Truth’, charged by the Muses with distinguishing good from bad writing and duty-bound to confer immortality or oblivion ...”

“... boundary-crossing, opens Fintan O’Toole’s White Savage, on the fascinating career of William Johnson in 18th-century British America. Though well-known to scholars, Johnson’s story has not hitherto received the notice it deserves from the general readers who are clearly targeted here. O’Toole plans two follow-up ...”

“... to register quite how strange it is that the headlines should be dominated by the figures of Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Dominic Cummings. Absent the idiosyncrasies of these men, and the way they determine their interactions, the present crisis would be playing out in a different way entirely. The central fact of ...”

“... do proper planning,’ he said. ‘We didn’t listen to the experts. That’s obvious.’ Christopher Prentice, who headed the FCO’s Near East Department in 2002 before becoming ambassador in Jordan, explained the institutional nature of the problem. ‘We were set the policy,’ he said, ‘and had to deliver it. In Amman I was not involved in ...”

“... Until very recently I had never read any B.S. Johnson. I had a staticky reminiscence of what he might have been, which could be represented, using his own idiosyncratic conventions for marking the lapses that run through our consciousness of the world, as ‘experimental … . suicide … . wrists was it?’To clear the static first: these reprints are to celebrate what would have been the eightieth birthday of the novelist B ...”

“... futuristic. It was, in Alvarez’s phrase, ‘outer space with bad weather’. This is the story Christopher Harvie has to tell. His is an immensely important book – astonishingly, there is no other good account in print of the North Sea phenomenon which has changed the world oil market, transformed the British and Norwegian economies ...”

“... which occurred in April 1951, ‘Wilson had become “a deviationist from the Bevan line”, Carol Johnson, the secretary of the PLP, declared as early as December 1951 ... By January 1952 Wilson was sounding out Bevan and Crossman about a proposal that he should go back on the front bench.’ Clear? Another way of making the same point is to cite John ...”