Search Results

“... hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about ...”

“... Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Driving Miss Daisy and The War of the Roses (starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner). Roger and Me may not have done quite the same at the box office as these big hitters – $6.7 million dollars in the US, as against more than $100 million for Driving Miss Daisy – but given that it only cost $140,000 to make, this ...”

“... use of self and anti-self. Previous critics have often taken too narrow a view of Gregory Smith’s emphasis on the tendency to combine opposites as a characteristic of distinctively Scottish writing. Buthlay is right to emphasise that this view of Scottish culture was important to MacDiarmid precisely because it suddenly made the Scottish cultural ...”

“... later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun Pollock for South Africa. The Coloured all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira came to prominence in 1958, when he led a ‘non-white’ tour to Kenya. Some of his achievements on that tour were staggering – 46 runs off one eight-ball over; 225 ...”

“... he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led ...”

“... of whom he approves. Bill Clinton is ‘a great guy’, as is the Taoiseach John Bruton. Andrew Smith is ‘a nice guy’, and so is Guy Verhofstadt; Andrew Adonis is ‘a thoroughly nice guy’. John Hutton is also ‘a thoroughly nice guy’, while the footmen at Balmoral are ‘very nice guys’. The president of Bulgaria is ‘a lovely guy’ and Jean ...”

“... Frederick Swynnerton​ was a portrait painter born in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man, in 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist ...”

“... the anti-Communist purge and began a vigorous media campaign to end the blacklist. In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered ...”

“... of a two-speed Europe, in which Britain would be consigned to the slow lane. John Major and Douglas Hurd believe Britain will be in control of the 1996 agenda, and dismiss the possibility that others any longer wish to move faster towards integration than they do. Therefore, they contend, the old model of fast and slow tracks is out of date. Brittan ...”

“... died vomiting dark blood ‘which looks like coffee with the grounds suspended in it’, as Douglas Porch records in his history of the Foreign Legion. Moreover, they found themselves entangled in a guerrilla war against enemies who sprang ambushes and galloped away unscathed. The only Mexican engagement celebrated in French military history, the last ...”

“... Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but so did ...”

“... have swept home in any potential contest. Exhaustive research carried out by the American pollster Douglas Schoen with the assistance of R.W. Johnson suggested that Powell’s recommendation to vote Conservative was decisive in Heath’s rather surprising election victory in June 1970, while his recommendation to vote Labour (so as to secure a referendum on ...”

“... temple at Ephesus.’ The brothel scenes were heavily pruned: this was a Pericles, in the words of Douglas Jerrold in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, ‘disinfected of its impurities in a manner that would win the praise of the most fastidious member of the most moral Board of Health that ever held its sittings within the camphored precincts of Exeter ...”

“... for housekeepers, repairs to tennis courts, swimming-pools; there’s even a suggestion that Douglas Hogg claimed for cleaning out his moat. The papers are suddenly full of pictures of Home Counties mansions set in acres of manicured lawns, straight out of Country Life, allegedly maintained at taxpayers’ expense. Proof, in case anyone has ...”

“... director of the White Star Line, who according to the script insisted that the ineffective Captain Smith, emblem of Britain’s exaggerated sense of its seafaring skill, drive his ship at full speed through an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by ...”