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“... The Making of a Master is at the V&A until 11 January.) While his contemporary Turner bestrides the history of European art, Constable remains a largely domestic taste. There was a time when almost every home had a reproduction of The Hay Wain. Tours of ‘Constable country’ on the Essex-Suffolk border were popular by 1893 and are still ...”

“... the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville may have been intended to mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a notorious spendthrift – was one of a handful of courtiers who, according to one witness, ‘dazzled ...”

“... and the timber-screened Garden Building (1967-70) at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. They were, in Mark Crinson’s description, ‘writerly, artistic-minded, avant-garde and unabashedly intellectual’, known for their many books as much as for their relatively few buildings (a third, posthumously published volume of their collected works, Alison and Peter ...”

“... broken and on a table hundreds of tiny scratches in groups of six, with a seventh drawn through to mark the weeks: ‘Week after week all the same, except one which had only five scratches.’ Eventually, despite these sinister indications and other difficulties involving the mechanics of lighthouse management, local insects and a strange and hostile ...”

“... down to this earth’. And we can tell she is beautiful from the inside because she carries its mark with her everywhere, in the streak of Christmas glitter buried deep and sparkling in the skin of her knee. Like the love she has known and the money she has come into, Morvern’s beauty frees her from pointless want. Unlike a real-life woman, she does not ...”

“... grew worried and alarmed if his gout did not return regularly. Besides, gout was very much a mark of status. Lord Chesterfield said it was ‘the distemper of a gentleman, whereas the rheumatism is the distemper of a hackney coachman’. It attacked not only the wealthy but the creative, which meant that no man of letters could afford to be without ...”

“... life was an absolute mess. In his thorough and entertaining authorised biography of Cash, Steve Turner establishes a suitably saintly tone on the first page. ‘It was doubtful,’ he writes of his subject, ‘whether he had a bodily organ that hadn’t been operated on, an area of skin that hadn’t been gashed, or a significant bone that hadn’t been ...”

“... US National Book Award, phoning up journalists, as it seems he really did to the Independent’s Mark Lawson, and speaking to them in funny voices. But then again, Roth would not be Roth if he were not clearly a man who knows the value of a gimmick when he sees one. There are, however, several issues to be discussed around the theme of Roth and his mania for ...”

“... their way to look masculine, well, that is the way it was. Why, incidentally, is there a question-mark after ‘victory’ in the title? Women war-workers turn up again in Caroline Dakers’s The Countryside at War, tilling the land in company with soldiers, German prisoners and conscientious objectors, a more-than-dubious mix in the farmer’s eyes. The ...”

“... to Sandby even by his admirers, a term that managed to appear at once innocently descriptive and a mark of inferiority. Samuel Redgrave, in his biographical dictionary of artists first published in 1874, remarked that Sandby ‘did not get beyond topography and the mere tinted imitation of nature’; of Francis Jukes, on the other hand, Sandby’s friend and ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who – he suggests – probably heard it from Reggie Turner. In her version, ‘a curious, very young, but hard-eyed creature appeared, looked at him, gave a sort of laugh, and passed on. He felt, he said, “as if an icy hand had clutched at his heart”. He had a sudden presentiment. He saw a vision of ...”

“... as worthy. It is impossible, in the light of Haggard’s upbringing, to mock his desire to leave a mark on the world; an inspiration not ignoble, as it were. He had never seriously wanted to be a great Parliamentarian, deciding with his habitual concern for gentlemanly standards, that the House of Commons was ‘hardly the place for a self-respecting ...”

“... of Nancy Mitford’s letters, Love from Nancy. Others who have been at the nest eggs include Mark Amory, who edited The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, and Artemis Cooper, who gave us the Waugh-Cooper correspondence in Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch. So what is left? We are assured that 80 per cent of the Mitford letters and 40 per cent of Waugh’s in this volume have ...”

“... about it, unlike Wilson. The death of his wife, after which he wore black for life, was a dividing mark in his career. There were fewer of those half-legendary carousals where tireless practical jokers downed ‘the Blood of Kings at only half-a-crown a bottle’ and bellowed songs about Burgundy and Roncesvalles. Some of that gusto now animated the younger ...”