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“... bush-baby is closer) grotesquely engulf most of her cheeks. The projecting lips of The White Negress are a caricature. Brancusi does things which would give a cartoonist reason to pause, and manages to make of them something which is witty, not coarsely humorous. His genius was to make sculpture that is playful without being coy, light in spirit ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... Highland charge. He boasted that ‘fire by ranks’ would deal with it, and told his friends at White’s Club that he would sweep the rebels out of Britain with two regiments of dragoons. But outside Falkirk, his guns sank axle-deep into the mud as he tried to occupy a high moorland position he had never seen or reconnoitred, while ‘a ferocious ...”

“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... to mind. But it turned out that there was no mystery, no sinister revelation to give weight to Peter Ackroyd’s appropriation of Hawksmoor’s buildings as stages for the malevolent and occult. Although the burials had been decent and officially sanctioned, the bodies were there contrary to the intentions of the Commissioners appointed under an Act of ...”

“... pursed for pouring water in so it came out through a small aperture between its legs. I called it Peter though it had no prick – it looked too ugly for a girl I thought. I used to fill it up and souse my lap. Sometimes I’d press its squashy latex head to force the liquid out at higher speed, yellowing the pee by adding mustard in, or making diarrhoea with ...”

“... of taste seem an absurd condescension. Even Pop Art was still fine art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of ...”

“... revealing section on the social frisson provoked by the intrusion of arriviste Thatcherism. Peter Jay, with his impeccable pedigree in the aristocracy of Labour, appointed by his father-in-law to the Washington Embassy in the era that closed in 1979, speaks with peerless assurance about the lower middle class who were subsequently to supplant him and ...”

“... not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but really confuses the relationship which matters most – that ...”

“... City is billed as ‘Russia v. The Rest of the World’. In the middle of the party, dressed in a white suit with wide lapels, matching shirt and handkerchief in his breast pocket, his large hands covered in rings, was an elderly man carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase. At every opportunity he glanced at his reflection in a mirror, fixing up the curl in the ...”

“... on a level with the seats of the stools on which the two poor men sit. Bread and wine stand on a white cloth. The iconography echoes representations of the supper at Emmaus.Some have seen the painting’s sobriety as evidence of Le Nain’s Protestant sympathies. The recognition that what is shown is an act of charity has led to another title: Le Fermier ...”

“... so to walk streets lined with almost unbroken rows of houses whose red brick or tile-hung walls, white woodwork, projecting rough-cast bays, substantial door canopies and picturesque irregularity of layout bring to mind a 19th-century picture-book illustration of an old market town somewhere in the south of England.In Bedford Park the look went with a way of ...”

“... colours are differently refracted.It was Newton who saw that constituent colours of rays of white light entering the drop are variably refracted. The 42° cone from the eye describes the position of raindrops which project the red part of the spectrum. At a slightly smaller angle the eye receives light from the blue end.The simplest, abstract rainbow of ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”

“... can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been thinking about for a long time. In 1979 he published his first novel, Kindergarten, a short and desolate work which won the Hawthornden Prize. A meditation on ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the grimmest of tales, Kindergarten describes a world ...”