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“... in a picture can speak for him or her self.Official portraiture offered its own opportunities. James Waterhouse, who was having a terrible struggle with the heat on an excursion during which he not uncommonly took a portrait nine times before getting a good negative, struck gold in Bhopal, where the Begum joined in the photographic game with ...”

“... does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”

“... Ponting assaults the entire political and administrative apparatus, retail and in gross, while Campbell and Connor go for the army of snoopers and data-gatherers. What they share is a thought which would have shocked a previous generation of political commentators – the thought that the British Civil Service is absolutely not to be trusted, that the ...”

“... another pleasure of work seen in a provincial context. For example, Eardley studied briefly with James Cowie, whose painting of two schoolgirls (more Jean Brodie than Balthus, but with a bit of both) is tightly composed and painted – the opposite in handling and drawing of Eardley’s child portraits. It is not surprising that she argued with him. But to ...”

“... as any a three-dimensional work can offer – more so, for example, than what happens to you with James Turrell’s light pieces, even the most minimal. The rest of the Hayward (Gormley has used every gallery and taken over spaces in corners and behind the stairs as well) is filled with things. Some are as much architecture as artwork; many, like Blind ...”

“... the series gave me my first sight of the work of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson seems not to have attempted to reason ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... Britain (until 17 September) there are writings, culled from various sources, by Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Susan Sontag, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Bernard and Colm Tóibín (Barnes has also made a loan to the exhibition). Some are affectionately biographical. Comparisons between Hodgkin’s art of memory and Proust’s are made.* The pleasure ...”

“... commentary is not new. The patchwork made in his spare time in the decade between 1842 and 1852 by James Williams, a Welsh tailor, shows Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark and no end of animals. It also applauds modern engineering with representations of the Menai suspension bridge and the Cefn viaduct. There are patriotic and religious quilts which would elevate ...”

“... of Osbert Lancaster’s drawings, cartoons, illustrations and set and costume designs, selected by James Knox, will begin at the Wallace Collection on 2 October. Lancaster was a short man with a big head, strikingly large blue eyes, a curled moustache and a dandy’s taste for very good, but emphatic clothes (pink shirts, bow ties). He surveyed English society ...”

“... the sometimes charming young lady painters.’ Du Maurier offered the plot of Trilby to Henry James, who didn’t take it up but who had, in The American, already noted the same class of Louvre lady painter: Christopher Newman looked ‘not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those ...”

“... actual motion, and done with such light airy facility. Oh! it delighted me when I saw it,’ James Northcote, a pupil of Reynolds, said, having watched Gainsborough at work on Queen Charlotte’s drapery.But these accounts of his later practice are irrelevant to the pictures one turns to first: those crisp, bright, freshly coloured group portraits in ...”

“... recall to current political debate, if only to induce a necessary modesty. K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell, the British side of the joint Anglo-American team producing the letters, have taken time off to edit Carlyle’s Reminiscences. They have stripped away the varnish laid on by previous editors and reinserted what earlier prudence deleted. The ...”

“... streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps’. These struggles to accommodate what Henry James called ‘our crude and silent past, our garish climate, our deafening present’ to European traditions resulted in a realist tradition which may turn out to be America’s greatest contribution to 19th and 20th-century painting. Professor Novak’s book ...”

“... Westmacott’s statue of Francis, 5th Duke of Bedford still looks down Bedford Place at Charles James Fox (also by Westmacott). His hand rests on a plough; a sheep and a cherub laden with produce among his supporters record his interest in agricultural improvement. (Woburn Abbey, his country place, gives its name to local streets.) In the centre children ...”