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“... point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary generation. He was a mixture of Pan and Peter Pan. Clive Fisher, who has written a very good book on Noel Coward, was quite right to give this elegant study the subtitle ‘A Nostalgic Life’. Being Anglo-Irish helped the nostalgia. Connolly senior had been a Major in the British Army and when he ...”

“... I enjoyed rather more than did your contributor, Janet Watts (LRB, 8 December 1988), Kenneth Clark published a contribution to art history called The Nude. A disgruntled friend of mine opined that if the author had any integrity, he’d have started off his opus: ‘Wankers, ahoy!’ (Oh, the jaunty irreverence of those days of intellectual ferment, and ...”

“... In 1956,​ James Sutherland, a professor of 18th-century literature, delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge on the subject of ‘English satire’. ‘In recent years,’ he announced, ‘there have been signs of an increased interest in satirical writing,’ but even he couldn’t have seen what was about to start unfolding in a year or two, on his very doorstep ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... It was the patrician Alan Clark who most accurately summed up the approach of the British and American Governments to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Nothing, he reckoned, was better for business than a lot of foreigners killing one another. This has been true of all foreign wars throughout the ages, but for businessmen of the Clark mentality a hot war in the Eighties which demanded endless supplies of expensive weaponry and technology was almost too good to be true ...”

“... is something Wright learned during his apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson. In 1762 Francis Knowle Clark Mundy inherited Markeaton Hall. He had Wright paint him and five of his friends in the livery of the Markeaton Hunt – his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with hand on ...”

“... by his sense of honour. Her third husband is a more serious contender for her love: Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) is Scarlett’s male counterpart, just as devious, just as heated. He’s no gentleman, but then she’s no lady. Beguiled by Ashley, dismissive of sexual desire and apparently hostile to the idea of motherhood, Scarlett resists him. These passions ...”

“... deal in depth with English linguistic history. For example, the collection of papers edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Language, Self and Society. This, you’d think (I thought), is just what is needed to excite a fresh interest in the history of English. Well, I thought wrong. The volume is too miscellaneous in topic and treatment to fulfil the ...”

“... Surrealism’, ‘Guernica’ (in 1937 Picasso’s latest) and ‘Cross-shaft at Codford St Peter, Wiltshire. Early ninth century (photos John Piper)’. ‘Of course we were as poor as church mice,’ Piper assured me once, with Myfanwy nodding agreement. Poor but busy, they were flush enough to buy a secondhand Lancia and roam the country seeking ...”

“... Whitehall’s pandemic procurement spending. ‘We successfully tied Tony Blair into FOI,’ David Clark, the former Labour minister and an architect of the original act, told me recently. ‘Now we need the government to abide by the legislation, because it’s information that belongs to the public in the first ...”

“... is three books: Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938), The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941), and the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1963, published as Varieties of Parable (1965). The new Selected Literary Criticism reprints material from 1931 to the year of his death, 1963: mostly reviews of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, a few cultural ...”

“... was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson, behaviourism rejected explanations of action in terms of mysterious inner processes such as ‘thought’ and tried to explain behaviour purely in terms of the organism’s conditioning by experience. By the middle of the century, the ...”

“... Lord Carrington and Norman Tebbit must be the Jacob and Esau of the Tory Party. Peter Carrington is beyond question a smooth man, and Tebbit is, if not hairy, certainly very prickly. They are also chalk and cheese politically, even though both have in their time been chairman of the Conservative Party. Lord Carrington is the scion of generations of Whigs, a man bred to the ideal of public service and in many ways an unrepentant ‘wet ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... There were memorable high points: in the late summer of 1909, he accompanied Freud (and Jung) to Clark University, and in the spring of 1910, he acted as Freud’s spokesman in the founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association, whose first president was Jung – which caused severe discomfort among Freud’s Viennese adherents. In the spring and ...”