Search Results

“... a collection of essays and leaked documents revealing less celebrated aspects of Nato’s history, Grey Anderson argues that even during the Cold War the alliance was never principally a mutual defence pact. Particularly in the early years, ‘European leaders looked to Nato as a bulwark against internal subversion as much as against the Red ...”

“... fiction and understands how an investigation is supposed to unfold. ‘Time to regroup the little grey cells,’ Atkinson has him tell himself after a setback. ‘He tipped an invisible hat in Poirot’s direction. Jackson preferred the Belgian to Miss Marple. He was straightforward, where Miss Marple was endlessly devious.’ Unfortunately for him, his ...”

“... Winston Churchill through the greatest world war in human history, while John Major isn’t just a grey man with very little public persona – he is a man with extraordinarily little experience beyond his trainee stints at DHSS, the Foreign Office and the Treasury, following a single term as a councillor in Lambeth. Even by the standards of a government which ...”

“... from colonial rule into statehood, or in the case of some American holdings, towards a convenient grey zone between colony and military base. In this utopia the US was to be at once the summa of world history, never to be equalled, and the model that would have to be followed. The planners drafted blueprints for the United Nations as a way to package ...”

“... economy to alleviate waste and disorder. But he did actually say. Few others have. In Perry Anderson’s view, Marxists have been ceasing to do so since the Bolshevik coup in 1917. Ever since the 1880s, they had understandably been more exercised about how to escape from capitalism than about what to do once they had. Lenin’s success and the ...”

“... sudden movement of the flat of his hand to his head – smiting his brow or stroking his shock of grey hair? – whose effect always hovered between the histrionic and the playful. Afterwards, as we went off to an official supper, an incongruous quartet, something of the same trick of perception as when I first knew him recurred. The youngest of the three ...”

“... that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing which I like: very true to life. Every few hours ...”

“... proceeding in that way might also be tempted to give up. For the heart of darkness is curiously grey. To write this tract Selbourne has turned self-consciously to his Jewish roots, notably those of the prophetic tradition. Yet the thunder, when finally delivered after grieving foreplay of incredible duration and intensity, amounts to little more than a ...”

“... the same sort of false moustache. They are called, we soon learn, Mr Blue, Mr Green, Mr Brown, Mr Grey – possibly not their real names, but a touch of criminal style Tarantino certainly borrowed for Reservoir Dogs. The caper in both films involves the hijacking of a New York subway train heading south into Manhattan from Pelham Bay Park. The 123, I learn ...”

“... father. He had punished the wrong son. The institution in which the young James Carew O’Gorman Anderson took up his post in 1914 had been in existence for nearly fifty years. By then it had no parallel anywhere in the world. Its origins lay in the crisis of the Ch’ing Empire in the mid-19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion gave a Western ...”

“... a teacher and a writer for film journals, one of which, Sequence, he co-founded with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. Along with Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz aimed to bring a version of auteurism to British film, and they did as much with the documentary movement Free Cinema. In 1959, Reisz directed We Are ...”

“... British equivalent of the theorist André Bazin. British film studies were still in utero. Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert didn’t start the student magazine Sequence till a year after Great Expectations appeared. Anderson, it goes without saying, despised David Lean. Another energetic hater, Wyndham Lewis, wrote of ...”

“... 13 January. Having supper in the National Theatre restaurant are Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. ‘I suppose you like this place,’ says Lindsay. I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline ...”

“... complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested. But it is more likely, as Katharine Anderson suggests in her engaging and enlightening study of Victorian meteorology, that the depressive Fitzroy was pushed over the edge by a quite different scientific controversy. Could the weather, and more particularly storms, be predicted? As a seaman and a ...”

“... of Waugh is a violent declaration of distance between the two species. I disapproved of his grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and the excessive width of his trousers; he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight. Later he asked me, at second hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I ...”