Search Results

“... of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from ...”

“... Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a British publisher. Pounds have always been a dodgy stock, of course, but still ... Audens, on the other hand, have long been a very judicious buy. ‘In Solitude, for ...”

“... of Beowulf in the late 1940s; it was first published in 1952. Recent versions by Seamus Heaney and Michael Alexander might have made the need for the republication of Morgan’s less urgent for anyone who just wants to get hold of a good modern Beowulf, but as an early and defining Morgan poem it remains indispensable. First of all, the poem is a ...”

“... of Hungarian nerve, social bluff and show-business instinct once commanded the British cinema. In Michael Korda’s telling, however, the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great ...”

“... now two, to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the ...”

“... Ingmar Bergman’s​ Fanny and Alexander is currently back in cinemas, forty years after its first release in Sweden. Both early and late on in the film, there is talk of a ‘little world’. On the first occasion, the world is the theatre; on the second, it is the family. There are plenty of links between them, and several subsets of each (magic lanterns, puppets; morally casual households, grimly puritanical ones ...”

“... different in different epochs, as society and technology develop. Keegan presents four examples: Alexander the Great, a ‘heroic’ commander; the Duke of Wellington, an ‘anti-heroic’ commander; Ulysses S. Grant, a supremely unheroic commander; and a little surprisingly, Hitler, a man seldom thought of as a military commander at all but in practice a ...”

“... force, despite seeing so much? The controversy and protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 exposed the lack of official data on police killings. Two newspapers launched investigations. The Fatal Force, a database maintained by the Washington Post, records ‘every fatal shooting by a ...”

“... It is a commonplace assumption among modern historians that minority rule has always had to rely on devices to preserve social distance. These have usually consisted of distinctions of dress, comportment and speech, and of restrictions on commensality and connubium. In Western societies they have operated within the cultural framework of class. Kenneth Ballhatchet takes the equally familiar notion that in colonial societies alien minority rule translated class distinctions into those of race ...”

“... lost her seat, as did all the Lib Dems in Scotland bar one. Perhaps the biggest victim was Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury and the other hero of Laws’s account, after Clegg and Laws himself (‘March 2014: David Laws announces fairer funding for English schools’). Alexander was ‘an outstanding ...”

“... Alexander the Great​ was a pioneer of political spin, a master of image-making. He permitted only a single court-approved sculptor, Lysippus, to do his portrait and took a team of propagandists and influencers on his invasion of Asia. On a medallion dating to late in his reign or just after, he appears in the guise of Zeus, holding a fiery thunderbolt – the first time a European monarch minted his own image ...”

“... of Austerlitz on his reputation, but set over Barclay’s head as supreme commander (after Tsar Alexander) as the crisis of the 1812 campaign was reached after the abandonment of Smolensk. Of course, Kutusov’s reputation with posterity owes much to Tolstoy’s portrait in War and Peace, where the drunken old womaniser is depicted as a Russian ...”

“... and events of the present time; which is to say, the novel has its own poetic truthfulness.’ Michael Hofmann’s translation does justice to the disclaimer: fifty years on there is still great power both in the portrayal of Keetenheuve and in the book’s anger at bureaucratic politics and the hothouse world that stifles his idealism. Koeppen’s writing ...”

“... way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate.’ Michael Ignatieff was born in Canada in the 1940s. ‘My friends,’ he remarks a little sheepishly at the start of his book, ‘had suburban pasts or pasts they would rather not talk about. I had a past of Tsarist adventurers, survivors of revolutions, heroic ...”

“... Triremes seem to have enjoyed a continuous history into late antiquity, but after the death of Alexander the Great, the kings and kinglets who competed for his legacy began to build much bigger ships, and the reason for this is more difficult to explain. The basic trieres was a ‘three’, but literary sources tell us of ‘fives’ and ‘sixes’, and ...”