Search Results

“... now known as the Antonine Plague, named for the emperor at the time, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. As Colin Elliott explains in his lively account of the outbreak, the fact that sores appeared all over the body seems to rule out the disease that we call plague, where the buboes are concentrated at the groin, neck and armpits (boubon is Greek for ...”

“... awards more usually given to works in prose: Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers took the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013 and Sarah Crossan’s One (about conjoined twins) carried off the Carnegie in 2016. These are good omens for The Long Take, which has been long-listed for the Man Booker this year. The Long Take is not just a verse novel, it’s a historical ...”

“... as he sometimes calls himself. Francesca recalls Great Expectations. The grammar-school boy hero, Colin Ferguson, is the son of a self-improved, atheist, socialist, environmentalist schoolmaster father. The characterisations are as easy to take apart as lego, each piece a pet Scruton peeve. A sensitive youth, given to swooning when his problems press, ...”

“... a vacuous liquor-lushing loafer … this hill-billy … best known for his guzzleosity’. George Elliott Sweet in 1956 argued that Elizabeth I was the true author: ‘When would a busy queen have time to write plays? … It is a well-known maxim that you go to a busy person to get things done. The very fact that there are no plays with Elizabeth as authoress ...”

“... an NSC meeting in late April. ‘Why isn’t anybody stopping these looters?’ ‘By the time Colin gets to the White House for the meeting, this had better be fixed.’ ‘We need to find out what he knows,’ I directed the team. ‘What are our options?’ ‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘Where the hell is Ashcroft?’ I asked. ‘Go,’ I ...”

“... destroyed or simply fell to pieces is unknown. The first record of it is in 1797, when Colonel Colin Mackenzie, later Surveyor-General of India, visited the site and describe ‘a great low mound, the upper part of which rose in a turreted shape to the height of twenty feet’, with a diameter at the top of about thirty yards. By the mid-1790s the stupa ...”

“... a tantalising but vicious ambiguity: what was done to her? Or, what has she done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train ...”

“... casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’ In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’ That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not ...”

“... eastern seaboard. From the vantage of the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had ...”