Search Results

“... for a ‘rational motive’. Critiques of deterrence feature prominently in other recent books. Laurence Martin argues in his Reith Lectures that the theory of deterrence based on ‘mutual assured destruction’ has ‘serious and probably fatal flaws’. He goes on, however, to endorse a refined version of nuclear deterrence which emphasises ...”

“... part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence. Earlier she had asked Watts to repaint it, but he refused, and during her husband’s lifetime she had not succeeded in finding another painter whom she trusted to touch it, so that it had hung unchanged for a long time on the walls of Farringford. We ...”

“... occasions catch up. I’m not sure who else works in this mode at the moment, but the fiction of Laurence Sterne is full of it, and its most notorious modern instance occurs in Duck Soup, where Groucho Marx, invited to hold out the hand of friendship to an enemy, imagines himself doing it, imagines the enemy’s response, imagines himself responding to the ...”

“... best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of ...”

“... colleges in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘was to impart knowledge, not to create it’, as Laurence Brockliss and his colleagues put it in their uniquely detailed and reasonably candid history of Magdalen.* However, even these years were enlivened by a good deal of delinquent behaviour, with many of the fellows summoned in 1520 to answer charges of ...”

“... to cope with current problems and current needs.’ Just a decade later, however, the liberal Laurence Tribe, paraphrasing the liberal Ronald Dworkin, wrote: ‘We are all originalists now.’ That’s even truer today. Where yesterday’s generation of constitutional scholars looked to philosophy – Rawls, Hart, occasionally Nozick, Marx or Nietzsche ...”

“... of Edmund Gosse and, of course, the two recent books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, one by Robert Martin and one by Norman White, but there has been nothing comprehensive. There is now. In Robert Bridges Catherine Phillips tells us everything we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is more still to be said, but one of the ...”

“... Mystery of Freemasonry Discover’d (1724) and Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected (1730) to Martin Short’s Inside the Brotherhood: Further Secrets of the Freemasons (1989), the dominant genre in Masonic literature has been the ‘exposure’. Rituals, passwords, oaths, handshakes and symbolic imagery pique the curiosity of the uninitiated, or ...”

“... Westminster. Widely known after the publication of an exchange of letters between himself and Laurence Sterne, he was enough of a celebrity to sit for a portrait by Gainsborough. In 1782, two years after his death, Sancho’s letters were published, by subscription. Almost 1200 people paid up, and the publication seems to have raised the large sum of ...”

“... looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean War quickie narrated by the much ...”

“... be agreed that Francesco d’Aspermont, a well-bred Italian army officer, was the poet’s father. Laurence Campa’s biography of 2013 has now cast doubt on this. Campa also suggests that Guillaume’s younger brother, Albert, born two years later, was probably the product of a different relationship from the one that resulted in the birth of Guillaume. While ...”

“... he says of one of the Femintern members, sounding less like a Parisian intellectual than a Martin Amis hero. Will, however, is married to a psychoanalyst of East European origin, who lives in France and teaches in New York. He is the friend of Paul Fals (the ‘Trotsky of psychoanalysis’), Laurence Lutz (a ...”

“... Miller of the Sunday Times Magazine that her husband had ‘a gift for inaccurate précis’. Laurence Marks elaborated on this aside in one of his excellent unsigned profiles for the Observer in 1984: All good raconteurs ornament the truth. Archer’s technique is more radical. The facts of the story are usually true (more or less), but they have been ...”

“... to be his natural allies we have to understand something of Finley’s background. Whether or not Martin Jay is correct in The Dialectical Imagination in crediting the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung with such an influential part in the revitalisation of Marxism in the Thirties and Forties through the development of what they called Critical Theory ...”

“... norm during life. Failing that, writers might agitate for pre-publication advances closer to the Martin Amis mark, though I doubt that they’d get them. On the face of it, a greater stress on ‘moral rights’ is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in practical terms, it means is that an author can still object to mistreatment of what remains ‘his’ work ...”