Search Results

“... comic masterpiece, Kaas, now available for the first time in English, in a translation by Paul Vincent (Granta, £10). Willem Elsschot was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder (1882-1960), an advertising executive who wrote novels in his spare time, ‘unbeknownst to his family’. Kaas was written in the space of a fortnight (it’s very ...”

“... achievements is not difficult since the greatest of these murals are in Parisian churches.Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff, is a five-minute walk from the Gare du Nord (also by Hittorff). It was consecrated in 1844 and, because Hittorff was an authority on the use of colour in ancient ...”

“... said of Garrington: ‘The kindest explanation is that his memory was playing him tricks.’ PC Paul Berry, a serving officer, said he had seen one of the men with a cut lip and a black eye. His evidence, said the judges, ‘does not help the appeal’. Two officers from Winson Green Prison at the time the men were admitted, Peter Bourne and Brian ...”

“... as the truth: their sole purpose, it has been said, is to answer the question ‘Howzat?’ Paul Foot’s question, who killed Carl Bridgewater? was not the question before the jury which in 1979 at Stafford convicted three men and a boy of shooting in cold blood a 13-year-old lad who had evidently stumbled on a burglary at Yew Tree Farm in ...”

“... Animal lovers​ who read this book – and no one else will, or should, read it – will not be able to put it down, but they will come away from it feeling vaguely uncomfortable. The subject itself would tend to make the book one long dirty joke; but the issues it raises are deadly serious, touching the tender spots of racism, sexism, sexual abuse and, indeed, the nature of sexual otherness ...”

“... one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s early ...”

“... gets savaged and shredded in the course of all that follows. Repeatedly, the words and deeds of Vincent van Gogh stab at the framework beneath. With a peculiar and terrible force, his letters pit the reader against what’s hard in art and what’s cold in money, lashing out in search of something that, for want of a better term, could be called the ...”

“... a special unit of gendarmes entered the priory of Saint François at Nice in search of a certain Paul Touvier, who was living there under the name of Paul Lacroix. An arrest was made and within half an hour Touvier was on his way to Fresnes prison in Paris. He was eventually installed in its hospital. The gendarmes had ...”

“... calls. I get enough correspondence from TV tycoons and assorted maniacs by mail.’ In a letter to Paul Theroux about the American edition of The Old Patagonian Express he referred to a scene where Theroux had said ‘every reply broke my heart’: ‘I don’t believe that one’s heart can break more than once without considerable damage to life. After all ...”

“... with the paper’s backers, and recent research seems to show him in no very creditable light. Paul Addison begins a commentary on Churchill’s career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of ...”

“... Two years later, in 1989, Guibert brought out his purest, most idiosyncratic love story, Fou de Vincent. It is the tale of an abortive affair with someone totally ‘unsuitable’. When a friend meets Vincent he asks Guibert: ‘Who’s that?’ On discovering the kid’s name he says: ‘That’s ...”

“... the philosopher discussed in the volume edited by Hoy, the philosopher who, as Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow tell us, was able to go ‘beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics’? The purpose of Hoy’s collection is to present the state of the discussion ‘from an Anglo-American perspective’. Some of the essays in this volume criticise Foucault and others ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... of the 20 best works ever in the genre, Hombre. The film was directed by Martin Ritt, and starred Paul Newman, with Richard Boone taking the acting honours as the psychopathic adversary. Hombre is patently a remake of Stagecoach. But whereas John Ford’s passengers were a cross-sectional mixture of the good, the bad and the redeemable, Leonard’s coachload ...”

“... Last year, the Society of St Vincent de Paul spent €6.1 million giving people in Ireland food. This year, it says that requests for food are up 50 per cent, that calls in general are up 35 per cent and in Dublin 50 per cent, and that 25 per cent of callers are new clients, many of whom were contributors to the charity at the church gates last year ...”