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“... The Making and Unmarking of British National Identity in 1989.* In his rich keynote essay Raphael Samuel put his emphasis on the second of these processes. Distinguishing British from English identity at the outset – as harder and more formal, its connotations military-diplomatic-imperial rather than literary or rural, but also more inclusive ...”

“... us from the Latinate culture that spawned figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes and (at its end) Samuel Johnson. The waning of humanistic education in the 18th century, and the later separation of the modern academic disciplines, has made Utopia doubly distant and difficult. Without a knowledge of the categories More was manipulating, we are left with ...”

“... Even the scholarly popularisers are neglected. Julian Morgenstern is only mentioned in passing and Raphael Patai is not mentioned at all; nor is Louis Ginzberg’s seven-volume The Legends of the Jews, which is, by general consent, the major classic in its field. Maccoby, who is librarian of a Jewish college in London, certainly knows all such stuff and much ...”

“... could enjoy reproductions of pictures scattered throughout Europe.’ We hear the Whig politician Samuel Romilly remembering how the Soho parlour of his tradesman father was a little gallery, ‘elegantly adorned’ with ‘the beautiful prints of Vivares, Bartolozzi or Strange, from the pictures of Claude, Caracci, ...”

“... these might not sound like the ingredients of a very satisfactory work of art; but the picture, Samuel Palmer’s The Valley Thick with Corn, conjures a masterpiece out of its incongruous elements in a way that is wholly exemplary of the artist at his best. Palmer’s technique seems to have been unique, a striking combination of intricate pen-work and ...”

“... lions, cows, goats); landscapes, views and ruins; and, most strikingly, pieces of the human body. Samuel Pepys, a century before, would have called these ‘brave cutts’. Page after page displays eyes, chins, mouths (grinning, aghast, pursed), ears, hands and feet, each part excised from the whole to float in a manner both exemplary and forlorn. This is the ...”

“... the viability of ballads like ‘Chevy Chase’ and other transgressions of ‘fancy’. Only Samuel Richardson really strove for refinement, which, as the result proved, was writing against his grain. Refinement was of course a strong, though highly ironised, element in Sterne’s novels. Even Reynolds was quite capable of the ‘impoliteness’, the ...”

“... aged proprietor. Illuminated by the last rays of the sun is the portrait of Jesus Christ by Raphael. The spectres of the religious and beliefs of ancient and distant races crowd upon him. In the course of this astonishing tour de force Balzac invokes Cuvier, the ‘greatest poet of the century’ – greater even than Byron. The palaeontologist’s ...”

“... often to dramatic effect; but also a series of stunning temporary exhibitions (Richard III, Samuel Pepys, Cecil Beaton’s photographs) which had ‘the whole of London agog’ and queues of people round Trafalgar Square. These ‘Diaries’ – in fact, partly reworked versions of a variety of ‘jottings’ and more crafted set-pieces, interspersed ...”

“... it lacked the prestige it now commands. In 1660, for example, the French philosopher and essayist Samuel de Sorbière wrote the following on the subject of the amateur art historians in and around the Royal Academy of Painting: Their great aptitude consists in knowing how to identify the artist after glancing at a picture, then being able to pronounce on his ...”

“... The only comparable episode in recent centuries is the re-evaluation of Italian painting before Raphael. Hill records the excitement over an altarpiece by Jan Mabuse (Gossaert) among antiquaries in the 1790s, but Fra Angelico and Botticelli are not her concern. The rediscovery of the national past is undoubtedly a large enough subject. However, it is worth ...”

“... places, the realising of a caprice. The placeness of the non-place – think of the titles of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), or News from Nowhere – has been central to utopian thought, and has moved in lockstep with European attitudes towards colonisation. Mundus Novus, a pamphlet containing a letter supposedly written by the explorer Amerigo ...”

“... even at the time. Lately I have picked up the crown folio volumes devoted to Botticelli, Vermeer, Raphael, Velazquez and Leonardo. I note them in the chronology of their publication, which was a chronology of war and the time leading up to it. The Leonardo was published in 1944, the Velazquez in 1943, the Raphael and ...”

“... of the literature on the subject quoted by the authors. One is reminded of the splendid chapter in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon describing the ‘Musical Banks’ which demand and exact reverence, though their currency is of no practical value. Butler, of course, aimed his satire at the Church, but what is nowadays called the ‘Art World’ has always shared ...”

“... And the Democrats held on to their majority in the Senate and might even increase it if Raphael Warnock prevails over Herschel Walker, a Republican former football star, in the Georgia run-off on 6 December. (That Walker is regarded as a plausible candidate is one of the strange fruits of the Trump era.) The Senate majority will be indispensable to ...”