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“... spiders; a menacing black servant with eyes glowing like coals; a naked young woman supine on a stone altar, breasts heaving, knife raised over her throat. But only a minority of his novels involve devil-worship; Baker’s title ties together the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social class. Wheatley suffered ...”

“... keen sense of smell. In what reads like an itemised denouncement of the modern (as opposed to the Stone Age?) world and its evils – capitalism, prostitution, Third World poverty, unchallenged scientific enterprise – Homo sapiens has become the real threat to a humane society. This conceit, if a little well-worn, might still have worked had Lessing not ...”

“... in Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, published his autobiographical novel Cast the First Stone in 1952, but it was at San Quentin Prison that things came to a head. San Quentin had an unusually progressive warden, Clinton Duffy. (Braly’s memoir spells out Duffy’s achievements: ‘he brought in the movies, the school, the hobby programme. He began ...”

“... the field and the others were rounded up on the road south, at Stockport or Macclesfield. When a stone was thrown at the prince regent’s coach on his way back from the opening of Parliament that same month, Lord Liverpool’s Tory government enacted another round of repression, suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, thus enabling imprisonment without ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... There is perhaps no better guide to the dauntingly complex issues involved in these questions than Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects. First published over twelve years ago, this concise, elegant and wide-ranging book has established itself as an indispensable text for undergraduate courses in aesthetics. The second edition leaves the original text ...”

“... Diversions’, Barrell produces two fine chapters on the ‘popgun’ plot and the strange case of Richard Brothers. Just before Hardy’s trial began, the London newspapers carried reports of an attempt to assassinate the King. Three members of the LCS – Peter Lemaitre, a watchcase maker, George Higgins, a shopman, and John Smith, a bookseller – were ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”

“... sizing (applying a protective, anti-absorbent compound) and finishing (rubbing with a smooth stone). In early modern Europe, the process of dipping, removing and tipping took about twenty seconds. An efficient partnership of vatman and coucher might produce four reams (two thousand sheets) of paper each day. There were writing surfaces before ...”

“... in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of ...”

“... the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”

“... sister of the Thomas Cromwell who went on to become Henry VIII’s great minister. Morgan’s son Richard entered his uncle’s service and changed his name to Cromwell in 1529. (Occasionally Oliver referred to himself as ‘Cromwell alias Williams’ – even on his funeral effigy he is described as ‘Of the name Williams, of Glamorgan, and by King Henry ...”

“... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...”

“... hills are shadows and they flow,’ Tennyson reflects. One of Pater’s heroes, looking at the stone of his college window sill, observes that the very fabric of the ancient university city is composed of millons of dead bodies. The extended visions of the past which the new art museums also provided could paralyse as well as inspire. To think of Cuvier ...”

“... to stay at Easter. He looked after his own field boundaries, layering the hedges and mending the stone dykes, and when I told him one evening that the blackthorn was flowering already down by the river, he exclaimed: ‘I shall have to get down there in morning! Sap will be rising.’ So variety of work and good conservation went hand in hand. Now a ...”