Search Results

“... picked up. ‘Are you safe?’ my 20-year-old said.‘There’s none of us safe in the world.’‘No, I’m serious. Trump’s been shot or something.’I got up CNN on my phone. ‘Loud bangs heard at rally; Trump whisked away with blood on face,’ the headline said. It was all symbols. The red cap that said ‘Make America Great Again’. The tight little ...”

“... always notice the ends of shifts. T. doesn’t feel satisfied at close of day: ‘You’ve got no vision of what will happen to a call once you put the phone down. It goes off somewhere else, someone else deals with it and whether they get things right, get things wrong, get it fixed, you don’t know.’ At the end of the day, T. will walk home again, or ...”

“... and the chattering classes whose legitimation-anxieties he so searchingly addresses? (There is no one so anxious nor so devoted to Shakespeare as a legitimate prince, to judge by the current heir to the throne.) We have heard all too many earnest pronouncements, including a correspondence in the London Review, in recent months, as if these alone could ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... in general, that made up his earliest memories of family life. Carpenter then went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1864, straight to the heart of the Broad Church network, and eventually to a fellowship in that college, newly relinquished by Leslie Stephen. In June 1870, he was ordained by the Bishop of Ely, and got to know F.D. Maurice, Professor of Moral ...”

“... your dad?’ Rayner thinks for a minute about how he might stick up for his father then says: ‘No ... That’s not my dad. Must be someone else.’ But in all fairness, the first lie was cast by the father himself, when he precipitated that headline in a stunning act of desertion. Richard has the same panicked idea much later, when Jack Rayner rises from ...”

“... Perelman and Groucho Marx.For my young self, the crucial juncture occurred when, thanks to Annie Hall, Allen became famous in England. Up until 1976 he was an oddity, a little-known Jewish funny man, a minority-interest comedian. With Annie Hall all this changed, and at least for the art-house-inclined, his film became a ...”

“... the most efficient vector. When bitten by a rodent flea humans become an accidental host and play no role in disease transmission except in rare epidemics of pneumonic plague.’ Our understanding of Yersinia pestis and its doings is very incomplete. We still cannot explain why the plague caused havoc in London in 1665 but not in 1664, or why it faded away in ...”

“... have to improvise. ‘Silence can be a great surprise,’ they write. ‘Day after day of silence. No ordinary city sounds in Steep, but also no thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft guns. No clattering crash of a nearby explosion. No wailing chorus of ...”

“... English and a bit Continental. Palatable modernity: a good postwar flag under which to assemble. No wonder the school system flew it so often, in those countless ‘musical appreciation’ classes.Approved, canonical Britten was also present outside school – fittingly, in church. No contemporary composer of similar ...”

“... Cabinet? Sometime in the spring of 1967, I trudged along to a protest meeting at Oxford Town Hall. The line-up was of the sort summarised by the phrase ‘stage army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the ...”

“... record that in the same month he had blamed Britain for the naval arms race, telling a Queen’s Hall audience that the Dreadnoughts should not have been built. Other myths originated in Lloyd George’s tendency, especially when talking to an attractive young woman, to dramatise or improve on incidents in his past. He seems to have thought a spiritual ...”

“... In the hectic skirmishes that followed, the inventor of the pocket handkerchief predictably proved no match for his battle-hardened cousin, Henry of Lancaster. Tricked into surrender at Conway Castle, Richard was brought south under heavy guard. Although he was still accorded all the honour due his kingly status, his subjects could not fail to observe ...”

“... retired Regius Professor at Oxford. From this conjunction, a classical or prophetic scholar would no doubt bring forth a portent: if the conjunction of three kings signified so much, what might the conjunction of three Regiuses symbolise? Perhaps this is a line a mere reviewer should not pursue too far, for there are many other things to be said about these ...”

“... of the king’s military cabinet. Bismarck immediately saw that the key to solving the crisis was no longer to secure a deal between parliament and Crown, but rather to eliminate all possible rivals for the king’s confidence. He altered his policy accordingly, abandoning compromise in favour of open confrontation. Military reforms were bulldozed through and ...”