Search Results

“... finding instant and compelling evidence to prove he was a complete nightmare. Yet this book by George Jacobs, who was Sinatra’s valet for 15 years, might be understood to be wired in a whole new way: it is perhaps the ultimate diatribe by the disgruntled ex-staffer; a new high point (or low point) in a super-readable genre that should surely be ...”

“... rivals. If you were looking for a rival almost in his exact class, you’d have to mention George Jacobs, valet to Frank Sinatra, who made his name, and unmade Frank’s to a small degree, by detailing his boss’s general dexterity when it came to smashing up a hotel room. Another rival would be Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish valet, a ...”

“... of real estate and cash-poor councils were taken into consideration, and that reason is: Jane Jacobs says no. This injunction can be traced back to the epiphany Jacobs experienced as a freelance journalist in Philadelphia in the mid-1950s when she visited new housing estates and old ‘slums’ with the city planner ...”

“... The​ 1940s was the generative decade for American dance. George Balanchine, who was inching towards the founding of the New York City Ballet in 1948, produced eight works for other companies. Antony Tudor moved to New York from London in 1940 and quickly created two visions of psychosexual implosion, Pillar of Fire and Undertow ...”

“... on out-of-town sites. The theoretical origins of this urban renaissance are to be found in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). When Rogers and Power write of a major shift in attitude in the 1960s, ‘against clearance and new building and in favour of inner-city renovation and the protection of traditional communities’, it ...”

“... In 1973​ , when George Balanchine was asked by his biographer Bernard Taper to appraise the previous decade of his life, he replied: ‘It’s all in the programmes.’ He meant that the most important information was already onstage: in the new ballets he made, the old ones he revived and the dancers he chose to perform them ...”

“... modified circumstances. Pritchett understands this. He observes in passing as he writes about George Eliot that now ‘we do not wish to be better than we are but more fully what we are.’ Most of us, perhaps, but not all, and certainly not all readers of novels. His droll precisions – as when he writes of W.W. ...”

“... take on this touchy matter is provided by Sinatra’s long-time (African-American) valet, George Jacobs. In his immensely entertaining memoir Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003), he defends Sinatra and the other Rat Pack roustabouts, and says the only people he ever got a real nasty sizzle of racism from were a few Mafia bosses, and the ...”

“... meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental utopian to be disappointed. In domestic affairs, Obama’s obeisance to the Washington consensus led him to abandon the bold approach he ...”

“... and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer Keorapetse Kgositsile and singers and dance troupes from Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago. Despite his scepticism about négritude, Soyinka came to see the premiere of his play Kongi’s Harvest. The historian Cheikh Anta ...”

“... largely complete, is probably the third most important exchange after those with Louise Colet and George Sand; and it comes from the mellower end of Flaubert’s tonal spectrum. The letters to Louise are almost wholly combative: he fights against being in love with her, he fights against seeing her (true lovers, he informed her, can go ten years without ...”

“... speech bubbles, a recent US export which the editors at Le Boy-Scout had disliked. Influenced by George McManus, an American cartoonist whose way with noses Hergé particularly admired, the first Petit Vingtième strips are strange to look at now. Tintin’s instantly identifiable outline – the reason he wore plus-fours for so long – isn’t yet in ...”

“... court injunctions and hurling makeshift weapons at advancing militiamen from behind barricades. George Pullman was so sure that labour insurgents would desecrate his corpse that he left instructions for his lead-lined casket to be covered with tar paper and asphalt and deposited in a vault made of concrete and reinforced steel. Small conspiratorial ...”

“... can seem, by comparison, over-fleshed. In her introductory essay, Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre juxtapositions of Max Ernst’s collage ...”

“... novelist simply mimics the dominant male practitioner – even to the length of calling herself George. Second is feminist fiction, where the strongest impulse is protest. Third comes ‘female’ writing, in which the main impulse is to investigate the condition of womanhood without any overt point-making. Bargate’s fiction is interestingly poised at the ...”