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“... at the very front and in the full light of day, Michelangelo and his companions, the great masters of the modern period from Leonardo da Vinci to the immediate past. The basic arrangement was obviously derived from Vasari’s Lives, published in 1550, although there were some surprising differences in the detailed classification. As a scheme it ...”

“... suddenly become vivid. The declared pieties of Neo-Classical doctrine, the roll-call of revered masters, the sketch of Virgil’s career act as a mere catalyst for the real point, which is that of an exhilarated personal recapturing of the whole Classical tradition. Such moments of fervour, where the penny suddenly drops, irradiating all the assertions of ...”

“... because they have produced so few rewards for the many and so much corrupt wealth for the few. Alexander Yakovlev, the great liberalising force of the Gorbachev years, thanks to his brief in the Politburo – Ideology – took the podium first. His limp is one of the rare memories nowadays of the Great Patriotic War. The Communists and nationalists who ...”

“... stodgy reading, is that with the exception of my own little book on Hume, in the OUP ‘Past Masters’ series – which, since they pay attention to my other writings, I take to have appeared only after their manuscript was completed – there is practically no modern contribution either to the philosophy of Hume or to the topic of causality that they ...”

“... prepared to lend them. ‘The Martyrdom of St George’ (c.1565). ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ (1565-7) ‘Mars and Venus United by Love’ (c.1570) ‘The Wedding at Cana’ (1563) ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1555) ‘The Conversion of Mary Magdalene’ (1548) ‘The Anointing of David’ (1550) ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ (1573) ‘The ...”

“... the Russians. After the Rhine crossing Eisenhower, without the permission of his political masters, cabled his plans for the final advance to Stalin, infuriating the British Chiefs of Staff – ‘it is not very satisfactory when Ike has to appeal to Stalin to help him control Monty’ (Alan Brooke). Monty, as we know, got as far as Lüneburg ...”

“... character; she could afford to visit Rome, Parma, Madrid and the Low Countries in search of great masters. Money is never neutral– as other painters were well aware. Here is Camille Pissarro in Paris reporting to his son Lucien in Bayswater on his visit to ‘Mlle Cassatt’ in April 1891:I want to tell you about the colour prints she is planning to exhibit ...”

“... Although an important aim of the exhibition was to explore the influence of the Spanish Old Masters – and their successor Goya – on modern French painting, we quickly realise that Murillo, who was by far the most admired, and much the most expensive, of the Spanish artists whose work became more available as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, did not ...”

“... Like, the men of his generation had ‘won’ the world and were giving it to us. They’d made us Masters of the Universe, and it felt, as in the time of Alexander, that what they’d created would last for ever. It didn’t though, did it? Don’t get me started. Four decades later, I think we all agree that a domestic ...”

“... The president of Bulgaria is ‘a lovely guy’ and Jean Chrétien ‘a good guy’. Douglas Alexander is ‘a very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough guy’ (a mark of approval). Only Gordon Brown – ominously for him – is ‘a strange guy’. Other character assessments are equally breezy. ‘She is a great person, Tessa [Jowell], just ...”

“... world I had grown up in, I tried to supply my own explanations, based partly on my reading of Sufi masters, but also on a half-baked knowledge of existentialism, Zen Buddhism and the ethos of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Only slowly over the decades was this exciting approach to reading a major religious text replaced by more academic strategies. (I ...”

“... deal with heresy charges, censorship by overreaching bishops, rivalry between friars and secular masters, and drunken brawls among students – who could matriculate as young as 14. One such brawl in 1229 prompted the University of Paris to go on strike to protest the killing of several students by the city guard. In a papal bull that finally ended the ...”

“... hover over him.Kollwitz modelled this image on the dead Christ, a recurrent theme among old German masters such as Holbein and Dürer, and the allusion to the Lamentation is even more explicit in earlier images such as The Downtrodden (1900). As Renaissance artists turned classical sources towards Christian ends, so Kollwitz repurposes Christian tropes in her ...”

“... got to it late. After the annals of sexual prowess, the annals of sexual infirmity. After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson – ‘it was around the clitoris that they made major discoveries.’ Sex is a problem because it is no longer supposed to be a problem. ‘Throughout history men have boasted of their conquests, and in liberated ages, women too,’ writes ...”

“... commanding and melancholy elevation whose cadence is that of the great Romantic and post-Romantic masters of English heroic metre. The idiom of ‘Autumn. A Fragment’ is part Keatsian ode, part Yeatsian high informality, finely and appropriately blended. ‘Demons’ is, perhaps less successfully, rendered in a style of Gothic balladry, mingling spooky ...”