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“... with Waggoners, with sun and moon on either side, which provoked Turner, was sold from Houghton Hall to Catherine the Great in Turner’s lifetime, but he could only have known it from a print. Lisa Vergara is particularly good on these binary compositions, which offer symbolic antitheses, and also symbolic continuities ...”

“... the Women’s Liberation protesters who stormed the Miss World competition at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970. I must have known about it already, but it was like I’d never got the point. Listening to that programme, for some reason, took me right back into my dumpy little-girl body, shamed at the sight of those poor women in their horrid swimsuits, shamed ...”

“... discover who painted it, when, where or why. Two years ago, at the instigation of David Bindman, Catherine Hall, Esther Chadwick and myself, the V&A subjected the canvas to a lengthy, state-of-the-art scientific examination. Frustratingly, its published report could not answer any of these questions.And then, a few months ago, everything changed. On a ...”

“... images of its pages available on the web. The event is celebrated by a display in the entrance hall of the British Library. The library holds 347 leaves of the Sinaiticus, bought in 1933 (there was a public subscription) from the Russian government. They arrived as a single, coverless stack of quires. Now bound as two volumes they can be seen in the ...”

“... with it than with the moors, or with his machinations against the Earnshaw family, or even with Catherine. The real secret of Wuthering Heights may be its fierce and compelling fantasy and metamorphosis of the passions and rages of five and six-year-olds – violence, food, pets, an obsession with being or merging with someone else, kitchen love and hate, a ...”

“... suggest that maybe there is nothing to tell, only telling itself. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall say they agree with Michel Foucault that ‘sex must be understood as discursively produced.’ (Actually, I don’t think they do agree, but more about that later.) If we take the point, then the history of sexual knowledge becomes the history of the making ...”

“... entire editorial board. No one, I suppose, wants to be in a movement with the people across the hall, and yet many movements – the Cambridge School, the Yale School, the Chicago School – have been so constituted. So new historicism, as we are told here by two of its founding figures, ‘resisted systematisation’ and ‘became rather good at slipping ...”

“... Eyelashes and lips are shown in sharply pencilled strokes. In the pictures of girls – Miss Catherine Tatton (1786) is an extreme example – black and carmine are applied so crisply that you would, today, think of mascara and lipstick. This way of drawing detail with a small, sharp brush on the softly modelled face brings attention to just those ...”

“... copies of the New Statesman and a collective season ticket to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway ...”

“... genius that perhaps this country has ever produced,’ Burke said (when they were still friends). Catherine the Great commissioned a bust, and placed it between Demosthenes and Cicero. Fox was a great Whig; a great orator; a great statesman. But words and phrases can become stranded too, and none of these mean what they used to. Fox was in opposition most of ...”

“... farcically dreadful. Top horror is his father, ‘Mad Jack’, who married the sizeable fortune of Catherine Gordon and then squandered it with extraordinary zeal. After his death, in greatly reduced circumstances, Catherine brought her boy up in Aberdeen, devotedly in her way, though violently fond and furious by ...”

“... The focus of 21st-century disapproval tends to be the position of Wells’s second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins, who came to be known as ‘Jane’. In 1891 Wells had married his cousin Isabel, whom he quickly came to find conventional, unresponsive and boring. Before long, he fell in love with Amy Catherine, a young ...”

“... the wronged maid; the spirit of an evil ancestor whose painting hangs in a gloomy panelled hall; the friend or relative who is dying far away. Dickens was discussing tales told around the fire at Christmas, but similar types appear in accounts that claim to be true. In The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead, Carl Watkins tells one of the ...”

“... Michael Heseltine finds space to mention the Venerable Bede, Sir Thomas More, Machiavelli, Newton, Catherine the Great and Adam Smith. But unlike Hugh Gaitskell in his memorable speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1962, he sees a closer link with Europe as the logic of a common European inheritance, not as a break with the past. For Gaitskell, steps ...”

“... forces) were dug up and symbolically executed, their skulls attached to spikes above Westminster Hall (Cromwell’s would remain there for 15 years). There were countless scores to settle: houses had been demolished, estates confiscated, blood spilt. Either the king would have to unleash a reign of terror or he would have to act as if nothing had ...”