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“... of have around them the frigid crimps of invisible – and sometimes visible – quotation marks. ‘Seriousness’ almost always receives its visible marks, as, in the Wodehouse discussion, ‘human interest’ does. Likewise, Bayley really means to write that Larkin is apparently uninterested not in art but in ...”

“... point of the picture’s formal language. It fits its figures and landscape together, it marks out relations between them ... but the edges and links are mostly implausible, and surely meant to be so.’ We may agree with all this, and yet still hesitate to accept the ‘hypothesis’ on which ‘the book as a whole is based’ – and which is ...”

“... appear over long roads and in big skies, glow strangely and don’t do a lot – a few scorch marks in the grass, some mutilated cattle. The CIA know all about boys’ aliens, the radar blips and the pilot’s black box, because boys can not only verify their aliens scientifically, they also conspire to cover this scientific proof up. Hence the 1947 ...”

“... to be the muse of true irony. This biography does useful service, but not much more, bearing the marks of one kind of worthy but unadventurous labour history. If Carpenter is to make sense in a new version, it will only be because he managed, in an actual historical struggle, to combine politics with other things: sexual emancipation, an anarchism not ...”

“... entropy in the universe gets ever so slightly larger. Because entropy is constantly increasing, it marks a direction in time: eventually, no energy will be available for use and the universe will grind to a halt. In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells evoked this grim prospect. As his travellers approach the far distant future, ‘the darkness grew apace ...”

“... together had the unintended effect of enabling them to organise. One leading anti-fascist, Leo Valiani, described confino as a ‘school of anti-fascism’. It wasn’t only prominent figures who were put in confino: a drunken song in a pub, a misplaced letter, a red tie on May Day could lead to confinement. A considerable amount of research has been ...”

“... After all these years, De Beauvoir still appears to be proud that only Sartre achieved higher marks in those first exams than she. What would have happened, one wonders, if she had come top? What would it have done to Sartre? Merely to think of it makes the mind reel. Only love can make you proud to be an also-ran.But Colette simply did not believe that ...”

“... drawn underneath them – it’s this that helps give them their three-dimensional appearance, and marks them out as works of art, as though they are drawings for stand-alone sculptures. Underneath the man-cone he has marked the words:JJ BEEGANSCULPTURERDUNLOP HILLBALLINASLOEThe voice narrating the film David and I watched that day on his NHS computer sounded ...”

“... advancing in politics. Seldom did he miss an opportunity, whether through the chance patronage of Leo Amery or an unexploited gap in the insurance market. He stood for Parliament at 23, ran the Young Conservatives at 26, was beginning to be seriously rich before he was 30. He has a chapter on his money-making, which was shadowed by vicarious controversy after ...”

“... Renaissance less as the ‘rebirth’ of antiquity than as its ‘afterlife’). This shift also marks a renewed appreciation of less renowned scholars such as the Frenchman Henri Focillon, a medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the ...”

“... and when the local convent told her to wait she took advantage of a pilgrimage to Rome to harangue Leo XIII, clinging to his knees until attendants carried her off. Gemma never got near the pope, never managed to get admitted to a convent at any age. They regarded her as too strange and too sick. ‘They don’t want me living,’ she said, ‘but they’ll ...”

“... his own clothes were, the funnier he was in someone else’s. In the Hitchcock film, the suit marks a turning-point: having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James Mason (Van Damme), who assumes Grant is one George Kaplan. After the bourbon and the car, Grant returns to the scene of the crime with the ...”

“... a lavish level of support (‘though I think that your yearly expenses should not exceed 10,000 marks’). Of course it was possible for beneficiaries of the capitalist system to be anti-capitalist in outlook (Lenin is the outstanding example). But there is little sign, either in Lukacs’s conduct or in his writings prior to 1919, of any principled ...”

“... as part of the ephemeral decorations for the triumphal entry into Florence of the Medici Pope Leo X. Had Sansovino died in the Sack of Rome in 1527, he would be accepted as the third greatest sculptor, after Michelangelo and Giambologna, to have worked in Italy in the 16th century, but he escaped from Rome and settled in Venice where, while continuing his ...”

“... over northern Italy. The period is popularly remembered, if at all, for the ‘iconoclasm’ of Leo III (r. 717-41), which is in fact hardly attested by contemporary evidence, and Constantine V (r. 741-75), who convened a council to inveigh against idolatry but did little of the image-smashing of which he was retrospectively accused. The decision of the ...”