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“... as Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Antonio Tapiès, and such contenders as Rachel Whiteread, Thomas Ruff and William Kentridge. Rosa Martínez selected the survey in the vast Arsenale, the old shipyard, where 49 artists and/or groups are spread out over nine thousand square metres.Both exhibitions include work that alludes to the present debacle of war ...”

“... effect on how the larger public views the recent past. Neither the length nor the argument of Hugh Thomas’s exhaustive history of the beginnings of the Cold War (the first of several volumes, he promises) will surprise anyone familiar with the author’s previous career. Best known for his enormous histories of the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban ...”

“... first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas Davies, who described ‘his aweful approach … somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from ...”

“... who had found in Kipling’s work ‘all that is most deplorable, all that is most retrograde and savage, in the restless and uninstructed Hooliganism of the time’. The Boer War provided plenty of scope for hooligans. The notorious celebrations sparked off by the relief of Mafeking in May 1900 were a world-class example of retrogression. Kipling thought ...”

“... Ass is funny. The idea, as well as the drawing, of ‘The Right Hon. Dress Suit, wearing his Jimmy Thomas’ is funny. (George Lansbury said he could never again see Thomas without thinking of it.) Low was also remarkable for his good humour. This is exemplified in his Lloyd George, whom he never managed to draw as other ...”

“... It is a daunting thought, particularly as no one seems ever to have thrown away a letter from Thomas or Jane: the libraries of the world are stuffed with them. Yet I have no doubt at all that this mammoth editorial task is very well worth doing, and it is being done extremely well. The Carlyles were extraordinary human beings and, as it ...”

“... publication, ‘Civilians and Barbarians’) from Spenser’s slurs on the Irish (‘stern and savage’) to certain terms bandied about today: ‘terrorist’, ‘bomber’. Brian Friel, another of the ‘Field Day’ directors, does something similar in his play, Translations, which isn’t only about the act of translating place-names from Irish to ...”

“... He also scoured his bottom drawer for material. The longest of the lives, that of Richard Savage, was substantially a reprint of a monument to a feckless and garrulous friend that Johnson had published in 1744. Johnson’s critique of Pope’s epitaphs from 1756 was appended to his ‘Life of Pope’, even though it provides an incongruously waspish ...”

“... elders. A devastating social critic over-impressed by heroes and dictators, Carlyle was humane and savage, radical and racist, an agnostic quoted by churchmen and praised as ‘a prophet in the midst of an untoward generation’ in Dean Stanley’s funeral sermon in Westminster Abbey. He was sympathetic to Irish sufferings after the Famine, but almost equally ...”

“... anecdote casting the artist in the role of perpetual adolescent. Nobody doubts that Dylan Thomas died of drink and a regressive, infantile personality: but the thing that is remembered about his last days is a remark (‘I’ve just had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’) which superbly typifies the kind of thing his public would ...”

“... to long prison sentences and pardoned only in the mid-1960s. Having examined and condemned his own savage feelings, Cioran suspected that all humans were ruled, as he had been in his youth, by an explosive mixture of anger and illusion. The democrats’ appeal to reason was for him a signal that in Western Europe this mixture wasn’t working any more. Soviet ...”

“... from the motels where he buys blowjobs from middle-aged prostitutes on Sunday afternoons. It’s a savage portrait, strangely out of keeping with Raban’s careful characterisation in the rest of the novel, especially his sensitive and nuanced depiction of Lucy’s relationship with Alida. It also doesn’t fit with the more sympathetic way Chick is ...”

“... one of the Reich’s lattermost days, we find Goebbels again settling down at bedtime with ‘Thomas Carlyle’s book’ drowning out the rumble of Soviet artillery and the RAF’s Mosquito raids. This is not an endorsement which brings a prophet honour in his own country. But Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their ...”

“... is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can one who strove with all his might to champion liberty.’ Swift’s claim to his rest from ‘savage indignation’ was ...”

“... by players with odd-numbered jerseys. I was ahead a few bucks when the Ohio State centre put a savage elbow into Magic’s young chin and Doc’s screams of ‘foul’ were interrupted by the sight of a White House adviser about to break open a vial of cocaine. Doc slapped me on the shoulder and muttered ‘Jeeesus’ – a sure sign of impending doom. Doc ...”