Search Results

“... I first heard of Turing in 1975 when I was writing a magazine piece on machine intelligence. Dr Christopher Evans of the National Physical Laboratories gave me an article by Turing, published in 1950 in Mind, entitled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. In it he proposed the ‘imitation game’ as an operational procedure for approaching the ...”

“... that Stevie Smith loved these lines by an unnamed satirist: Hush, hush, it couldn’t be worse Christopher Robin is having his nurse. And they make some peculiar gestures towards imaginative analysis. Stevie Smith’s mother once won a prize for a short story in a local Eisteddfod: Barbera and McBrien say that her daughter’s literary career could be ...”

“... before she, and publishing in general, were ‘comprehensively Virago-ed’, to borrow her friend Christopher Frayling’s not entirely approving phrase. A 1976 edition of Fireworks has a naked white man clutching at the breast of a naked black woman, the woman chained by the throat to the man’s spiky helmet. She also has what looks like a yellow octopus ...”

“... remarkable ‘cowboys’, gung-ho for even the riskiest and most illegal operations. Stansfield Turner, Carter’s CIA chief, quickly discovered that his instructions to rein in on covert operations were simply being ignored. This led to a sweeping purge which was, however, put into full reverse within months of Reagan’s election. The old Nixon ...”

“... to go back a century, that anyone in Britain was capable of responding to the achievement of Turner. This no doubt set limits on the painting that followed (the fact that Monet and others in France were capable is one clue to their painting culture’s strength), but it did not mean that the Pre-Raphaelites, to name his main inheritors, were in any sense ...”

“... scheme in Ealing was largely due to the availability of a garden shed in which to meet William Turner, who was supposed to be teaching her shorthand, but with whom she attempted to elope. After this the quest for a respectable husband became urgent. It settled on William King, later earl of Lovelace. The marriage was based on real affection and was a ...”

“... he writes to his first-born, Michael, in 1941. ‘My dearest,’ he addresses his younger son, Christopher, in 1944.What else can we learn from Tolkien’s letters? Well, he loved trees and the English countryside, and hated cars and machinery. He hated France and the French, although he did like Venice: ‘elvishly lovely’, he said. He loathed ‘that ...”

“... is now about, aided and abetted by the ever more reverent media. When Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in front of journalists that King Hussein’s grandfather – murdered outside the al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 1951 – had ‘died for peace’, no one challenged this historically untrue assertion. King Abdullah was shot down by a ...”

“... was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in the Royal East Kent Regiment, The ...”

“... his lap. Although de Pury modestly concedes that it would be an exaggeration to compare him to Christopher Columbus, he does want us to believe that he is a great explorer. He claims to have spotted Richter when he was still an ‘emerging’ artist. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that ‘contemporary art’ is ‘the New Old Masters’. When, in ...”

“... it is photogenic – the only easy way to see it as a whole is to drive there and park underneath. Christopher Beanland’s Concrete Concept is typical in this respect, a cheap and cheerful job encased in a cardboard cover intended to evoke a nice grey slab of concrete. Here the decisive encounter takes place in the West Midlands. ‘Why do you like these ugly ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... fear was that London workhouses were attracting scroungers from all over the country. J.C. Ribton Turner, a 19th-century beggarologist, recorded the graffiti on the walls of the vagrant wards of various workhouses and relayed it to a Victorian public eager for confirmation of their views on the great unwashed: ‘Private notice – Saucy Harry and his moll ...”