Search Results

“... Inside, the atmosphere resembles that of an airport terminal. It isn’t just the decor: the large hall, the white walls, the rows of functional seating facing the courtroom doors and the large windows through which the light streams in. Today, the youth court is in session, as it is once a week. Almost all the court’s clientele are dressed in ...”

“... His first piece, for piano, was nine bars long, most of it a quote from a music-hall song called ‘Ma Normandie’. He seems to have found the sounds of the cafés and nightclubs more alluring than the classical tradition, and a ‘Fantaisie-Valse’ and a ‘Valse-Ballet’ followed.By the mid 1880s Satie was excelling at the vie de ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... a passing resemblance to a small eastern deity, but even so it’s something of a lurch from this hall full of serene statuary, including the head of a 13th-century Buddha carved from sandstone, to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his lolling tongue in close proximity to Lyndon Johnson’s bottom (‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’, 30 April ...”

“... Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all. But the next few years promise no end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and ...”

“... on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They were the offside,’ the Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir said. ‘They never was known … to anybody.’By the time record companies got round ...”

“... peg its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape seeds. No matter. The poor farmers and small merchants from the nation’s heartland grasped the essential point: Bryan was challenging a rich, powerful, Eastern establishment in their name. Before the age of microphones, Bryan’s voice reached every cranny of the ...”

“... he would invent ridiculous sources for it – a delicatessen, a Pullman railroad car, a Tammany Hall club – while in his stories and poems he would always inflict on his leading character, who was always himself, a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse ...”

“... on hard benches, with bowed heads, resting, enjoying their £2 concessionary rides: they offered no recognition of this moment of national bereavement. The immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs ...”

“... it go away, for a while. If one’s world is dirty, poor, oppressive and unfair, then that may be no small service. Books furnish the mind in a form that the bailiffs cannot repossess. If we could recover the reading practices of past generations, we would be in touch with an experience that was at once intimate and formative, on a par with, even part of, the ...”

“... of the traditional guidebook, the second to the style of the popular historian. Yet there is still no satisfactory fusion of guide and history. It is not altogether surprising. For many authors, the purposes in question, and the methodologies, differ. As has been said, the uneasy relationship of the two forms has a long history. Part of that history can be ...”

“... in the Falklands) so that he might look the part on his arrival home, only to discover that no one was allowed to see him. Nor was this the last time that he was kept out of public view: at the thanksgiving service for victory in the Falklands at St Paul’s, Lawrence claims that he was shunted into a side-aisle, having been refused permission to wear ...”

“... was always I who had not turned to Christ. The fear produced slyness, or suspicion. I noted that no sick person was ever healed of anything, despite the laying on of hands, the prayers. Indeed, one of the kindest and gentlest people in the congregation died of cancer, despite the enormous prayerful effort to save her. I was bewildered. My parents told me ...”

“... War and Peace or that Anglo-Saxon chronicle so much beloved by Russians, The Forsyte Saga? Alas, no. Art does not work like that, even with a writer as talented, industrious and conscientious as Paul Scott. Art abhors a vacuum, and Scott’s sequence seems to be founded upon a wholly negative principle: the careful avoidance of anything romantic, dashing or ...”

“... arms, the right not to pay for health insurance. When representatives from Congress addressed town-hall meetings in the late summer, men in several states came armed with guns in leg holsters. Their local grievance was hostility to Obama’s plan for healthcare, a plan which was detested sight unseen, and which has still not been explained with sufficient ...”