Search Results

“... Four. The only politician respected by the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane, we are told, was Douglas Hurd. But was not Hurd openly attacked by the same Lord Lane in his monstrous judgment at the first appeal of the Birmingham Six, which he dismissed? In the cosy, cautious style of a BBC correspondent (one of Rozenberg’s most radical proposals is that ...”

“... is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and ...”

“... exile and death. Before Wilde’s self-destructive vanity and narcissistic love for Lord Alfred Douglas impelled him to prosecute the Marquis of Queensberry, his position had been that of an ironic dandy in a brutalised and hypocritical society. Wilde defined dandyism as ‘the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty’ and by this definition the ...”

“... below, he chats to his fellow journalists: ‘the pug-nosed, the pug-eared Morgan’, Davidson-Smith (‘overcoated’, ‘deerstalker-hatted’) and Freddie Fredericks, Frank Attercliffe’s aging and alcoholic mentor, and co-author with him of Pindar’s Weekend Round-up, a sports column on the Northern Post. After the match, in the Buckingham ...”

“... party leader also felt constrained to observe the Home Rule commitments of his predecessor, John Smith. Of course, once devolution had been achieved, matters were simpler: as members of a UK-wide party, Labour politicians in the new Scottish Parliament were expected to follow the party line dictated by Blair from London, notwithstanding the supposed autonomy ...”

“... him. The writer of these letters – the bulk of them addressed to his first wife, Alys Pearsall Smith, and to the woman who liberated him from the ruins of that first marriage, Lady Ottoline Morrell – must strike most readers as someone who, even in his early forties, was unequipped for adult emotional life. This volume, stout as it is, inevitably gives a ...”

“... one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the ...”

“... fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black Wednesday. But when the conventional ...”

“... Would Labour’s disaster of 5 May have happened if any of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of ...”

“... it impossible for either horse to be brought across the border. In those days the border fence at Douglas was not much higher than a sheep fence, and so the race went ahead in the autumn of 1958, with Relámpago running in Mexico and his contender in the US, either side of the fence, both plainly visible to spectators, wherever they happened to be. After a ...”

“... be thought to have renewed literature by his choice of blood-thirst, and if so why. Like Rainey, Douglas Mao is a consolidator. The ‘solid objects’ he has in mind are those reflected on (and with) by a quartet of eminences: Virginia Woolf, from whose short story the book takes its title, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Each eminence gets a ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait ...”

“... Macmillan’s prostate troubles in late 1963, it went instead to another ‘man of Munich’, Alec Douglas-Home, the 14th Earl of Home, who didn’t even sit in the House of Commons, but was, reassuringly, an Old Etonian and supremely unintellectual. If Butler lacked the ruthlessness required for personal advancement, his progressive allies in the party would ...”

“... protesting against the suspension of Jodi Dean, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in ...”

“... busy don, Sillery) to the more intellectual atmosphere of Balliol, he met Logan Pearsall-Smith, author of Trivia. The great man read an essay by Mackenzie called ‘The Undergraduate’s Garden’ and delivered his verdict: ‘Yes, yes, you have it in you. The authentic note of English prose sounds from time to time.’ That was just the trouble. The ...”