Search Results

“... ever likely to fall on the matter of Tibet, for reasons which become clear from a reading of Sandy Johnson’s work. She presents a remarkable picture of a diaspora driven from its homeland whom one might expect to become the Parsees of the next millennium, using the close-knit ties of religious distinctiveness to concentrate on economic ...”

“... The ant-lion builds its traps in sandy soil. It fashions – somehow – a geometrically perfect inverted cone. At the tip of the cone the ant-lion lurks, buried and invisible, waiting for any small insect to tumble in. When this occurs, the ant-lion at first makes no move. The walls of the cone are so smooth, the sand-grains they are composed of so fine, that only the largest insects can gain any purchase ...”

“... James Boswell created the ‘Age of Johnson’, rescuing the late 18th century, above all, for the Victorians. The Boswell industry at Yale University has given an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement ...”

“... with a gun.’ In 2012, after 26 people (twenty of them six and seven-year-olds) were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he suggested that every school in America should have ‘an extraordinary corps’ of armed citizens patrolling the halls. After all, Obama’s daughters were protected with guns: ‘Are the president’s kids more important than ...”

“... are the coconuts that floated or were carried across the ocean (studies are in print) to grow on sandy, salty atolls and feed the edible dogs, thatch the vegetable houses, bend in the inevitable cyclones, and grow, above all, into the symbol of ‘paradise’ sold. Here, too, are the islanders – classified, rather roughly, into three main ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”

“... a winning campaign in every region of this country – from the snowy banks of Minnesota to the sandy plains of Georgia. We concede not a single state. We concede not a single vote.’ An important principle governing the acceptance speech as a whole is that it should identify the speaker with dynamic action and change yet offer reassurance and ...”

“... artificiality. After a 17-line opening sentence beginning ‘The brig Henrietta having made Sandy Hook a little before the dinner hour’, the novel establishes less mind-bending terms for the appropriate level of language. Eighteenth-century capitalisation practices – ‘It is a melancholy Reflection, that … I am imprison’d today, in gross ...”

“... deeply uninterested in bin Laden and terrorism even though the outgoing national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned Condoleezza Rice that it would be George W. Bush’s most serious foreign policy problem. On 6 August 2001, the CIA delivered its daily briefing to Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with the headline ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in ...”

“... a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject’s zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of ‘Airworld’ – as Kasarda calls it – by jetting from terminal to ...”

“... practice. The creation of James Stirling, world-class architect, the man who as much as Philip Johnson or Arata Isosaki invented the ‘signature building’ and who travelled the rewarding circuit of international big money prizes, lectures and juries from the 1960s onwards, is a very contemporary tale of celebrity and image, fame and fallibility. His ...”

“... is granted time sufficient to revive the noblest political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World ...”

“... closes). The problem isn’t just ‘the criminal and the careless and the insane’, as Lyndon Johnson put it when signing the Gun Control Act of 1968. ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,’ the NRA insists. But, more precisely, American men with guns kill people. ‘What the hell’s the matter with us?’ Sullivan said when asked about the ...”

“... back pain, his sometimes disastrous women and his two marriages. I like the sound of his brother, Sandy, his mother and many of his boyhood friends, on whom he doesn’t turn his back. But it’s a fucking big book, which I actually fell over yesterday on my birthday.24 May. It occurs to me that the whole course of English history would have been changed had ...”

“... lad’s rock’n’roll indoctrination, with Ridgeley as Rizzo and Michael as a chubby, unibrowed Sandy. Ridgeley might have been a fan of Adam Ant but he wasn’t one at twelve, as Gavin says he was: he was fifteen when Adam Ant starred in Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk film, Jubilee, which wouldn’t exactly have been the main picture at their local Odeon; the ...”