Search Results

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... The first chapter of Ernest Jones’s misleadingly entitled autobiography, Free Associations, ends with a bemusing paragraph about the Welsh ‘servant who acted also as a nurse’ during Jones’s early childhood: ‘One of my memories of this nurse was that she taught me two words to designate the male organ, one for it in a flaccid state, the other in an erect ...”

“... or quasi-coalition regimes beholden to Moscow.’ If that was indeed the intention – and it may well have been – there would have been little objection to it on the part of Russia’s wartime allies, who in 1945 were in no mood to peer too closely behind a semi-respectable democratic façade. A policy of ‘Finlandisation’ in East and Central Europe ...”

“... It isn’t easy to talk about storytelling … Explanations only mystify. Sophisticated people may be able to explain their way out of mystification, and good luck to them, but a storyteller may well succeed in explaining his way into it which, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, is bad luck for him ...”

“... version, we go from a first stage when you must screw your cousins, to a second stage when you may not do so, and on to a final free-for-all when you do everybody. The present volume makes another major contribution to an overall theoretical issue in the discipline. There is a piquancy about this subject-matter of food. An outsider, at any rate if of ...”

“... to the suspicion, and he has, in fact, made use of some useful sources which were not available to Ernest Jones. The most important are the original series of letters to Wilhelm Fliess without the excisions which had apparently been intended to protect Freud’s posthumous reputation. So far, the suspicions have proved not to be unfounded. Other letters have ...”

“... checked in our days’ speaks the caution of 1867 as against the enthusiasm of 1832. But Ernest Jones could have done with Will Ladislaw’s luck. If Ladislaw’s connections with a ‘good family’ had been hopelessly vitiated by a parentage involving foreign and thus dubious, blood, Jones was well connected and wholly English, although born and ...”

“... Parsons of Grub Street I would like to point out that this is not my third, but my 19th book. May I also express a fogeyish surprise at seeing myself described as ‘Ernest’ in the headline. I first started writing headlines 70 years ago, but in my time we did not indulge in first-name familiarities on the lines of ...”

“... in Chevrolets and nursing homes, in bathtubs, on the interstates, in ERs, ORs, BMWs. And while it may be that we assign more equipment or more importance to deaths that create themselves in places marked by initials – ICU being somehow better than Greenbriar Convalescent Home – it is also true that the dead don’t care. In this way, the dead I bury and ...”

“... histoire de soldat, in which she worked off her animus against her unbiddable lover (Flaubert to Ernest Feydeau: ‘Since you’ve read Lui, read Une histoire de soldat. I assure you it will amuse you. It’s much better, because I’m in the foreground’), and of an anonymous letter to him years later accusing him of, among other failings, having sucked up ...”

“... Fifties by Bradford Booth. Indeed before his death in 1968 Booth had, with some assistance from Ernest Mehew, more or less completed it, but on what appeared to Mehew as faulty principles. Thus the present elaborate and magnificent edition, which is to run to eight volumes, is largely Mehew’s own work. One gets the impression that it could hardly have ...”

“... Khazanov’s global comparative study of pastoral nomadism is unique. The level of erudition may be indicated by the bare statistic that the bibliography runs to 48 closely printed pages of which 23 refer exclusively to works in Russian. For those who are not specialists in the field at this level of intensity, and perhaps even for those who are, the 16 pages of Ernest Gellner’s ‘Foreword’ provide essential reading ...”

“... not warn her that Ada was going to escape, as she did at the age of 18, into a luckless marriage. Ernest Leverson, a diamond merchant’s son, was unfaithful, a gambler, and couldn’t manage the money, although it is true that Ada was extravagant, and notably more so after she met Oscar Wilde. She became Wilde’s fast friend, and for a few golden years was ...”

“... has interpreted that collapse as an episode in the global spread of civil society – defined by Ernest Gellner as ‘that set of diverse non-governmental institutions which is strong enough to counterbalance the state and, while not preventing the state from fulfilling its role of keeper of the peace and arbitrator among major interests, can nevertheless ...”

“... When Ernest Gellner was teaching at the Central European University in Prague in 1995, the last year of his life, he cultivated informal social relations with the graduate students there. One student ‘confessed to unease when Gellner sat down to watch television with him – saying it was as if Max Weber had dropped by ...”