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“... Jane Brown has worked hard to fill in the gaps. She has found out that his mother was Ursula, née Hall, and that she was, like his father William, from a local family in Northumbria. She has also uncovered suggestive evidence that Brown had an illegitimate daughter, for whom he provided after his death. Otherwise, the biographical narrative remains ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going. Written around 1954, the poem got wide notice after ...”

“... to escape was Shakespearean theatre. Although the British military authorities who took over the John Street theatre in New York during the hostilities must have wondered whether the productions of Richard III, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth that they staged there between 1777 and 1783 were the last performances of Shakespeare or of anything ...”

“... suggest such a thing?) However, there is a certain family resemblance between the languid village hall in Florida designed by Krier and the replanned Italian town of Alessandria also featured in his book. ‘Modern is chronology, while modernist is ideology,’ Krier points out, to demonstrate that he isn’t a hopeless reactionary; he is perfectly ready to ...”

“... of the six essays collected in his new book, Heaven on Earth, strangely inverts this. Studying the hall depicted in Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage (now in Edinburgh), he senses that a painted figure’s eyes – eyes that are out of sight – are moving across the space, their attention straying sideways. He dwells on a thin strip of brushwork to the far ...”

“... of the Radio Age’, and acknowledges the strong effect on her of the annual Box of Delights – John Masefield’s exemplary exercise in quintessential Christmas makebelieve. Is this one source of Angela Carter’s feeling for the fantastic? What she shares with Masefield – the Masefield of the Kay Harker stories anyway – is an ability to locate her ...”

“... fact, as Vergo documents, Whistler didn’t know anything about classical music, preferring music hall songs, and it wasn’t his idea to call the paintings Nocturnes, but that of his patron Frederick Leyland. Another of his works, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862), had its musical appellation added later, possibly as a result of the critic Paul ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... the chance she might be his mother? Surely it should be the other way around, anyway. Augustus John used to pat the heads of all the children whom he met when he walked down the King’s Road because he wasn’t sure who was or wasn’t his and didn’t like to leave anybody out. Similarly, we should all treat all old men with respect, just in case. Seed ...”

“... Once there was a town hall official in Cumberland who was so enthralled by the mountains that he walked and walked them, penetrating every byway, surveying every vista. To amuse himself he drew them and wrote about them, year after year. And the more his marriage languished, the more he walked, and drew, and wrote, until the seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells were complete ...”

“... course she was brought from the family home in County Durham to be launched in London. From Seaham Hall, a solid neoclassical house which she always loved, with its views across the terraced gardens to the sea, Annabella was catapulted into Regency London, and a milieu of high taste and low morals. She enjoyed herself thoroughly at dances and parties, aware ...”

“... in the 1960s and 1970s. When visiting Duchamp on holiday in Cadaqués, Richard Hamilton and John Cage would try to avoid having to meet Dalí, whose villa was close by, and their hauteur is still felt by art historians and curators: Dalí was marginalised at the Hayward Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition in 2006, and at Tate Modern’s ...”

“... these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, but he sees radical possibilities in the ‘transgressive reinscription’ of such writers as Wilde, Genet or Orton, who undermine dominant structures of gender and class even as they appropriate and mimic them. Although he makes ...”