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“... obscured, but the poses are characteristic. In 1931 Woolf agreed to sit for Bell and the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, ‘pinning me there, from 2 to 4 on 6 afternoons, to be looked at; & I felt like a piece of whalebone bent. This amused & interested me, at the same time I foamed with rage.’ In the resulting sculpture she looks alarmed and alarming, with ...”

“... with faint praise. Clive Bell’s ‘Significant Form’ is an aesthetic curiosity, Roger Fry’s influence as a theorist long ago terminated. The pictures and decorative work of the Bloomsbury English Modernists – Bell, Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington (who can be one of the best) – are rightly and properly ...”

“... Silva’s café, where the cook, Romano, does breakfasts a piacere and, for those who want them, fry-ups to die from. For all its fixed furniture and leatherette upholstery, the café, now in the family’s second generation, has weathered all the well-heeled competition which periodically moves into the street. Romano’s eyes lit up when I asked him last ...”

“... keyboards, only more so. The equatorial air itself feels charged, on-line. It’s hot enough to fry an egg on a car bonnet, but you suspect that there are parts of downtown where the ambient microwaves could do the job while the egg-carton was still in the boot. Ubiquitous, sleek apartment blocks suggest North Korea finally in possession of concrete ...”

“... must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight. 10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about ...”

“... popular English vocabulary) live in a separate world in this country. It judges that Christopher Fry has a place in conversation, but not Roger Fry, nor Elizabeth Fry. The spy Fuchs has a substantial entry, but whereas the Macmillan Encyclopedia adds ‘his motives were ...”

“... limit to what she can achieve’ as a writer, is more debatable. Born in 1882, the young Virginia Stephen grew up in a society in which service, either giving or receiving it, was the defining relationship of domestic life, particularly for women. By 1850, Light tells us, 80 per cent of servants were female and they were mostly answerable to the mistress of ...”

“... seriously, and that is why it is especially pleasing that so distinguished a scientist as Stephen Jay Gould has chosen to take up the cudgels in the cause of demythologising the history of geological time. What makes his book so stimulating – apart from the fact that this volume is every bit as energetic, engaging and expert as the other half-dozen ...”

“... the Second World War. The first and most enduring members were Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey and Forster. Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Waterlow were also invited but fell by the wayside. Even by Bloomsbury standards it was an exclusive set. The members were all related ...”

“... Broad Church network, and eventually to a fellowship in that college, newly relinquished by Leslie Stephen. In June 1870, he was ordained by the Bishop of Ely, and got to know F.D. Maurice, Professor of Moral Philosophy and proponent of Christian Socialism. Carpenter was also friendly with Henry Fawcett and the mathematician W.K. Clifford (not R.K., as Tsuzuki ...”

“... found in skulls from excavated Baltic battlefields; the family tree linking up the reforming Pope Stephen IX, the lower Lorraine dukes who founded the kingdom of Jerusalem, the redoubtable Countess Mathilda of Tuscany, and Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had some right to think that he might have been Edward the Confessor’s heir; there is much, much more of ...”

“... to escape through Spain. Both were in contact with the Emergency Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including Chagall, Ernst and Arendt. Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was ...”

“... threads. The two young lovers first meet when Lito points out to Rosa another deformity, a fish fry with two tails attached to a single body. In the first section, Don Pepé’s driver remembers an act of extreme cruelty perpetrated by the mestizo’s father, who punished one of his plantation workers by forcing him to amputate his own hands. The book is ...”

“... them boldness, boosting a man with false courage so that ‘lyke a bedlem madman he feareth not to fry.’ The devil looks forward to taking eternal possession of the depraved soul as he burns: the condemned man ‘lepeth like a flounder out of the frying pan of temporal death into the perpetual and unquenchable fier of God’s justice’. Despite his careful ...”

“... and blankets for Spain; Patrick Hamilton deserted satirical realism for dystopia and allegory; Stephen Spender meandered Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris Lessing, so ...”