Search Results

“... personality covers a multitude of offences’, and this remained the case throughout his life. Ian Collins’s engagingly partisan biography conveys qualities not easily evoked, the appeal of a character whose default mode was happiness and who, if he had a tendency to ‘put his own interests first’ and to be ‘unreliable in an emergency’, had a ...”

“... to go into now.’ Recent sleuthing has filled in some of the gaps. Nicholas Barker and John Collins’s A Sequel to ‘An Enquiry’ (1983) clarifies the role of Wise’s reluctant partner, Harry Buxton Forman. The forgers’ liaison is fleshed out further in the biographical The Two Forgers, which offers the fullest and most readable narrative to ...”

“... 14 Catholics in the Millfield district of Belfast after a constable was shot. Although Michael Collins brought these killings to the attention of Winston Churchill during the London negotiations, Nixon was never arrested or charged. He became an embarrassment only when Sir James Craig and the Unionist hierarchy got involved with the Governments of the ...”

“... who died in 1987. It seems the invitation to MacNeill to tackle the master’s outlines came from Collins on the strength of a manuscript of his own he had submitted to the firm. It was ‘a heaven-sent opportunity for a man still in his twenties’, who until then had worked for the Holiday Inn chain. According to Webster, ‘the revived series of MacLean ...”

“... In different ways, most of Ian McEwan’s novels and stories are about trauma and contingency, and he is now best known as the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deems her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the title ...”

“... and science’s rationalist proponents. Nor, of course, are they really ‘wars’. As Ian Hacking has pointed out, to call them that is to trivialise the horrors of real war. The ‘science wars’ attracted that name because in many ways they are a specialised version of the wider, but equally misnamed ‘culture wars’ of academia (particularly ...”

“... Martin Amos Services, Julian Barnett Productions, Anita Brook, A.S. Bunning, Margaret Dolphin, Ian Rankin Plastics Consultancy, J.K. Roofing, Salman Investments; for the authors on the Booker Prize shortlist, we have Margareta’s Gowns (Birmingham), Trez Motors, five variations on Michael Collins (but he’s probably ...”

“... out of British public memory. This year, after a campaign by the Democratic Unionist Party’s Ian Paisley Jr, a plaque was erected in the House of Commons on the centenary of Wilson’s assassination. This decision was not without controversy. On the one hand, there are plaques to other sitting MPs who died violently, most recently Jo Cox and David ...”

“... perhaps only his wilful inaccessibility can explain it,’ or: ‘And it was strange – as Collins and Enderby privily agreed – how everything that Smiley said seemed to pass through the room like a chill; how in some way that they failed to understand, they had removed themselves to a higher order of human conduct for which they were unfit.’ Such ...”

“... sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in ...”

“... counter-claims. They are not the first to be one-sided. It is astonishing, looking back at Ian Watt’s book, for instance, to find that no woman novelist figures in his account. In Michael McKeon’s voluminous The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley and Mary Davys are disposed of in a couple of pages at the end of ...”

“... and nothing that you could describe as verbal wit and wordplay. You never have to reach for your Collins or your OED, and you never have to ask your nephew or a neighbour to explain the argot. This alone is enough to make him sound exotic. Instead of the usual attempt to create the effect of voice, to grasp, to reach and to capture a demotic, Crace appears ...”

“... Indifferent TV. Saturday 12: – Letter from Simon Callow, at last – Supermarket – Cowes. Ian Gibson’s Assassination of F.G. Lorca from library (rather disappointing). – Picked up Humphrey Carpenter’s Ezra Pound: A Serious Character unexpectedly. – Dull TV. Sunday 13: – Had made apricot mousse to follow lamb for lunch. Vin de Pays du ...”

“... first appeared circa 1957 and became attached to the Beatles around 1963.)In Marcus Collins’s The Beatles and Sixties Britain, Burgess is one of a long list of mainstream commentators (variously Grub or Fleet Street, middlebrow or mandarin) whose reaction to the Beatles was somewhere between a fit of the vapours and fear of imminent ...”

“... a tour deforce of compression and slightly pointless: everything has receded into smooth prose. Ian Frazier, in contrast, has burnished and bevelled Great Plains not at all, but rather followed his nose and slung in whatever took his fancy. If the result isn’t quite the ‘brilliant, funny and altogether perfect book’ that Garrison Keillor lauds on the ...”