Search Results

“... most engaged his enthusiasm – was poison gas. That’s the bit of Haber’s work which attracts Daniel Charles’s description of him in the subtitle of his new biography as the ‘father of chemical warfare’. As early as December 1914, Haber attended a test-firing of munitions containing a tear gas called xylyl bromide, and was immediately gripped ...”

“... up a British princess and an interpreter and got them to make polite conversation. Then there was Daniel, who wanted a child but whose girlfriend didn’t. After five years of precautions he began sleeping with another woman. The night he told me she was pregnant and that he didn’t love her, he told me also his recurring dream: he’s tobogganing down this ...”

“... looking up at his master, the lace, silver and silk: all these say more than the face. To give Charles I, a little man with a very ordinary face, regal presence, and to make his plain queen a beauty, was a gift the king knew the value of. In the exhibition the portrait of Charles by ...”

“... the World Bank) ‘target consumers’ implicit thoughts, feelings and knowledge’ – and from Charles River Analytics, which provides expertise in ‘psychology of narratives, cultural language patterns and semantics’ for the Department of Defense. Along with technicians and scientists from Boeing, Raytheon, IBM and Lockheed Martin, other attendees ...”

“... obvious echoes – a Black Lives Matter vigil was held in Hackney last year in memory of Rashan Charles, who died after being chased and restrained by the police in 2017 – but it’s useful to think about what has changed. Hackney, like other parts of inner London, has been through a vicious process of gentrification, one result of which has been the ...”

“... the permanent muse of a great composer’ (Wagner). Marie d’Agoult is also known as ‘Daniel Stern’, the name under which she published a vivid and well-documented Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (1850-53). Until the fall of the Second Empire, it was one of the very few books published in France to present a balanced and therefore critical ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred ...”

“... the tribunal system that uncovered the massive donations to the long-serving Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey by the supermarket millionaire Ben Dunne (the phrase ‘thanks a million, big fella,’ said to have been uttered by Haughey after an especially generous gift, quickly became shorthand for corruption). Despite these achievements, the tribunal ...”

“... The Protectorate was over, the Commonwealth had failed. Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660, his birthday, and began hanging judges and reopening theatres. Tongue firmly in cheek, a royal patent lamented that ‘many plays formerly acted do contain several profane, obscene and scurrilous passages’: the solution was to have women’s parts henceforth played by women, as ‘useful and instructive representations of human life ...”

“... reproachful, very English in its good-humoured and long-suffering manner, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe is in more ways than one a caution. The cautionary tale it tells concerns the unplanned growth of the canon of Defoe’s works, which has sprawled from a hundred items to something like six times that figure in the last two centuries. P.N. Furbank ...”

“... churches. One would hardly gather from his letters to them – or to close English friends like Charles Milnes Gaskell, Sir Robert Cuncliffe and Cecil Spring Rice – that the gamut of writers he casually and aptly quoted or alluded to seriously engaged him. Not one letter contains an extended passage on a literary work. His test for a storyteller, a ...”

“... many times over, since it started the chain of events that was to lead to the trial of his brother Daniel and himself for the crime of knowingly ‘uttering’ – that is, passing – a forged note. (The act of forgery itself, usually committed in private, was much harder to prove.) Since 1729 this had been a capital offence. As the ‘facts’ of the case ...”

“... was born in June 1948, which makes him the same age as Ian McEwan and a few months older than King Charles. Like McEwan, he spent his earliest years in Tripoli – his father, like McEwan’s, was posted there as a British army officer – and was sent back aged eleven to an England still shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the hands of ...”

“... Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected ...”