Search Results

“... If I had been Lenin I would have introduced the concept “shit” instead of “matter”. Shit is primary. How does that sound?! But it’s not only primary. It’s secondary, as well. And that puts paid to all philosophical argument.’ So much for dialectical materialism, a philosophy for which Alexander Zinoviev feels a professional scorn. Zinoviev’s academic speciality is logic, and his main work in that field (popularised in a forbidding volume called Logical Physics) is an analysis of the cogency and implications of the language of science ...”

“... Mastah Eastman just now come chop-chop say you plomise give him sketch-y lesson, you no lemember bime-by?’ It is shocking to find such dialogue – so squarely within the racist convention of the comic ‘Chinaman’ – seven pages into Timothy Mo’s novel about the first Opium War. Is this shameful convention, with its ‘all rightees’ and ‘yes Missees’, being endorsed as mimetically accurate by a writer at home in both English and Chinese cultures? If he does endorse it, he does so only to the extent of using it to show how small the point of contact between two cultures can be ...”

“... are the hallmark of Lewis’s writing at its best. They also got him into a lot of trouble. Paul O’Keeffe’s new Life of Lewis does not hold back on the toe-jam. Some Sort of Genius is, among other things, a compendium of the many reasons people found to dislike its subject. Lewis became, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by design, the sponsor of ...”

“... their status and reputation, rather than of how they looked at a particular time. In the catalogue Paul Edwards compares one of Lewis’s self-portraits to Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare. The juxtaposition is telling. In both in the engraving and Lewis’s portraits cheeks, nose, chin and eyelids read as sculpted volumes rather than soft, mobile ...”

“... that academics started taking an interest in the history of blacks in Britain. In the Sixties, Paul Edwards, originally a specialist in Old Icelandic, produced editions of the two most important African-British writers of the 18th century, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. In the Seventies, the Black Power movement’s insistence on the need for ...”

“... With the slush pile now going the way of the ice-cap, G.B. Edwards’s miraculous novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is one more instance – beyond the usually trotted out Lord of the Flies by William Golding, who was an admirer – of why that might be a pity, and why, ice-caps permitting, we might come to regret it ...”

“... and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their ...”

“... players died, including my father’s hero from radio commentaries and newspaper reports, Duncan Edwards, the left-half still often claimed to be England’s best-ever player. At 18, he was the youngest ever to be picked for the full national team – until Wayne Rooney and Theo Walcott. Frank Taylor, who covered the Belgrade match for the News ...”

“... Debbie Ladley. She was 18, a nanny, and she had given some help to LAND. James Cutler and Robert Edwards record: ‘On 29 September 1986, she was hanging out her washing in her garden at Stragglethorpe near Fulbeck. A man grabbed her from behind by the throat and banged her head against the wall. She suffered a fractured wrist, a cracked rib and injuries to ...”

“... In 1997, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote an article entitled ‘In Praise of Cheap Labour’ in the online magazine Slate, suggesting that those concerned about conditions in Third World sweatshops ought to save their tears for a worthier cause. The greatest beneficiaries of free trade, Krugman declared, ‘are, yes, Third World workers ...”

“... and his epigones with another story, a story with a villain – a whole family of villains. Louis Edwards was a corrupt Manchester butcher who became a director of Manchester United on the day after the Munich crash and who thereafter took control of the club, over a period of years, by buying a majority of its four thousand shares. This involved relatively ...”

“... it is not surprising that these three books should strike a rather apologetic note. Ruth Dudley Edwards begins her portrait of life in the Diplomatic Corps with the words: ‘Of all British Civil Service departments, the Foreign Office has the most negative public image.’ Her task is both to show how useful the Foreign Office is to British interests, and ...”

“... Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster Edwards hanged himself last year and I rang Bruce Reynolds for a comment (an explanation, if there can ever be such a thing) he referred me to Alvarez and The Savage God. Reynolds was always the most interesting of the train robbers and in a way it’s a pity ...”

“... journal is now available in an elegant translation with notes and an introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia. It is a magnificent book. Edwards has kept the apparatus of the key French editions, including Leiris’s own footnotes – many, as ...”

“... Americans who have anything to do with politics to be mild-mannered and level-headed, so when Paul Krugman came to London in May to promote his book End This Depression Now! (Norton, £14.99), even my landlord was impressed. Becoming a political pundit was never Krugman’s aspiration. You can tell he considers it slumming. His technocratic style suits ...”