Search Results

“... If a certain stoicism was required to get through William Burroughs’s disgusting novel, Naked Lunch, there are fewer problems with his mail. Indeed, the only danger is over-indulgence, for this stuff slides easily off the end of the fork. The letters here were written between 1945 and 1959. They begin with Burroughs at his family home in St Louis, from which he moves smartly through a series of addresses in the US ...”

“... examples. Why do we process this difficult thought so easily? Is that part of what it’s about?Oliver Hermanus’s new film, Living, is a brilliant treatment of this theme, an essay on its mixed familiarity and elusiveness. It’s a version of the Kurosawa movie (ikiru means ‘to live’), with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s set in the ...”

“... the radical Whig or “real Whig”’ of the 1690s.This enduring deception would appeal to Robert Harris, whose Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (1986) laid bare the combination of hubris and greed that prompted the premature newspaper publication in 1983 of extracts from sixty purported ‘diaries’ by Adolf Hitler – though that particular ...”

“... a reversion to normality or simply one more volatile experiment. The period following the death of Oliver Cromwell had been one of governments a-go-go, with at least nine separate constitutional configurations in the year prior to Restoration, some of them also greeted with bonfires and bells. Charles II’s great challenge was to turn momentary sentiment into ...”

“... and saying, ‘You ’ate me doant yer? ’Cos I’ve not bin to uni – i – ver – sity.’ Harris’s portrait of the bulldog-visaged, anti-intellectual, aggressive, insecure, class-conscious reactionary tyke reminds me powerfully of old Braine and his blatherings. It’s no surprise to find that Bernard Ingham, who failed to get to university and ...”

“... affixed to a breastplate. Using these, Joseph dictated 116 pages to a farmer called Martin Harris (they were subsequently lost, and never retranslated). A year later, Smith dictated the entire book – apart from the lost section – to a student called Oliver Cowdery, in a matter of weeks. This time, according to ...”

“... the disciplines of the market, what was known, after all, as ‘classical liberalism’. Oliver Smedley, who would eventually leave the Liberal Party in the early 1960s as a result of its support for European integration, promoted free-market views through organisations such as the Council for the Reduction of Taxation, the Society of Individualists ...”

“... suggestions here. Included among ‘Works edited by Shaw’ are the biographies of him by Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson in which GBS was a major collaborator. Mr Laurence endorses Shaw’s statement that he destroyed the evidence of his collaboration in Harris’s book (and wished to do so with Pearson’s) because of ...”

“... Hunt, a journalist from the Irish Times.’ At the word her eyelids clicked open. Sheep smell of Harris, breath smell of Hine, a mouthful of Harrods brogue, she could be his stepmother, the same bloody chic-Irish voice, the same speckled, braceleted wrist, jewellery jangling him forward under a battery of lights into ‘My sacred rrroom! My adorable ...”

“... is the point of language too. For Collier and Fielding – influenced by their close friend James Harris, author of a 1751 treatise on ‘language and universal grammar’ – words possess revelatory powers, elucidating ideas which would otherwise remain dark. Words aren’t abstractions from or mystifications of the external world but intimately tied to ...”

“... stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove gives ...”

“... most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of ...”

“... To this day, the Iraqis have not forgotten Churchill’s insistence on ordering not-yet-Bomber Harris to machine-gun defenceless women and children from the air in 1921, an episode Churchill then hushed up for fear of public outrage. Nor have the Iranians forgotten the coup fomented by the CIA and MI6 – and approved at a distance by Churchill – which ...”

“... racial justice was the Supreme Court’s early treatment of the Fifteenth Amendment. In Giles v. Harris (1903), plaintiffs claimed that the state of Alabama had participated in a conspiracy to disenfranchise African Americans. In an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the court concluded that even if the ...”

“... sailed for New York with their baby daughter, Caroline, in search of better wages. They lived on Oliver Street in Lower Manhattan, and Henry found work in a tailor’s shop. Two years after they arrived, he died of typhoid. A widow with a young child, Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in ...”