Search Results

“... position where I can consummate the ordeal by the further ordeal of writing it.’ He never did. Michael Hofmann’s The Voyage That Never Ends is not Malcolm Lowry’s, but it puts us as close as anything can to being in a position to assess whether Lowry’s ‘Life Work’, unconsummated and fragmentary as it is, really does have the unity he claimed for ...”

“... the OED) as Lawrence might have done. Some time around 1972 he came once or twice with his agent, Michael Bakewell, to a seminar at University College London, attended by students and lecturers but open to interested visitors. I can’t now remember anything he said, but he made himself welcome, and my memory is of a large and genially argumentative ...”

“... Logico-Philosophicus in 1916. The loss would be unfathomable.In Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, Cheryl Misak shows us how much Ramsey achieved in the little time he had. Her book is not the first to tell the story of his life: an unfinished memoir by his younger sister, Margaret Paul, was published in 2012, but it was missing a crucial chapter ...”

“... bonds of the social formation. Thus, in carnival, age, social status, rank, property, lose their powers, have no place; familiarity of exchange is heightened.’ The strategy of the Factory was indeed ‘super’ – to hyperbolise roles in a way that sometimes mocked them. But this parodistic play with the social order was only half-intended; it was also ...”

“... as chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne spent plenty of time talking about devolving new powers from Westminster in order to create a Northern Powerhouse, but his most effective act of power-sharing was to transfer the burden of responsibility for deficit reduction onto councils, which account for around 25 per cent of total government spending. No ...”

“... approach to policing: officers are, in Rowley’s words, ‘citizens in uniform using their powers with public consent’. In practice, however, politicians have always sought to exert indirect control over the police, and, at times, to intervene directly. The Met is particularly vulnerable to this kind of meddling. Its 32,000 officers are supposed to ...”

“... of dramatic form, beginning in the mid-Fifties with Preface to Film (written together with Michael Orrom). Here and in his later books Communications and Television: Technology and Cultural Form he set out to show how, thanks to the conventions of acting, directing and programming – not to mention the restricted access to the means of expression ...”

“... the Volcano) in Burgess’s. Where will this end? And when, oh when will somebody pick Earthly Powers! Greene, by the way, scolded Burgess for not honouring P. G. Wodehouse – ‘our greatest comic novelist’ – but then forgot to include the old wag in his own Top Ten. Enough? Enough. This selfsame word, come to think of it, sprang unbidden to the lips ...”

“... secretaries of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the assumption that Labour was vulnerable on crime by ...”

“... lay also the origins of British imperial ideology. This is not an entirely new idea. In the 1970s, Michael Hechter argued for the link between the ‘internal colonialism’ he saw England as implementing in its ‘Celtic fringe’ from the 16th century onwards, and the evolution of its empire overseas. And as early as 1907, Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of ...”

“... line’ of 1985 has turned into a global earth-shift. In his contribution to Shafted, Michael Bailey argues that since the spectre of socialism and historical materialism continues to haunt society, it’s legitimate to invoke Walter Benjamin, to keep ‘control of that memory’, and to ‘blast open the continuum of history’. Tony Benn, in his ...”

“... legally necessary. Wilmshurst’s line manager, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, shared her view that a second resolution was legally necessary. But Wood did not resign. He briefly considered it, he told Chilcot, but decided not to follow Wilmshurst. ‘Questions of conscience are very individual questions,’ he told the ...”

“... heroic even – but there are not many real experts on it, and fewer still with the literary powers necessary to recreate a way of life so remote from most modern experience. There are still big sailing ships at sea (though none that carry commercial cargoes); it is still possible to work aloft as a topman, encountering many of the same dangers as ...”

“... created a constitution with an advanced Bill of Rights, and a court of high calibre with full powers of enforcement, Saras Jagwanth has the candour to start by saying: ‘It is difficult to be sceptical of the South African experience of entrenching a justiciable Bill of Rights.’ I know of nobody who seriously suggests that South Africa would be better ...”

“... she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their ...”