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Journey to Arezzo

Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003

Piero della Francesca 
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002, 1 878818 77 5
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... for food, for peace. A columnar tree cuts across ashlar. Greys tending to lilac, mauve and olive green set off the plain white bowls of the orphans and the clean bandages of the wounded. The glowing oil lamp in the foreground and the sash window illuminated in the sober terrace beyond are at once marvellous and mundane, as light always is in Piero’s ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: In the Sierra Nevada, 9 October 2003

... boundaries in nature, and this is one of the most astounding: from the west, you can hike up a green mountain slope and come to the divide, where you look over at the beginning of a thousand miles or more of desert, stand in patches of deep snow from the winter before and look at a terrain that receives only a few inches of moisture a year. In most of ...

Petty Grotesques

Mark Ford: Whitman, 17 March 2011

Democratic Vistas 
by Walt Whitman, edited by Ed Folsom.
Iowa, 143 pp., $24.95, April 2010, 978 1 58729 870 7
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... is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? Are the things so strange and marvellous you see or have seen? It is probably the only moment in Whitman’s poetic corpus where he sounds almost like Thomas Hardy. Whitman certainly seems to have found the effects of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the ...

Dastardly Poltroons

Jonathan Fenby: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 21 October 2010

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China 
by Hannah Pakula.
Weidenfeld, 787 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 297 85975 8
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... Communists known as the ‘White Terror’, launched in collaboration with the city’s underworld Green Gang. Showing the self-interested flexibility that marked his long career, Chiang then allowed his hoodlum associates to turn on the businessmen in a wave of extortion and kidnapping that provided a flow of funds to the government he established in ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: Ash Dieback, 6 December 2012

... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...

Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt

Malcolm Gaskill: Alchemical Pursuits, 15 July 2021

The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020, 978 0 226 71070 9
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... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... too. 20 January. Note how much pleasure I get from anemones. I love their Victorian colours, their green ruffs and how, furry as chestnuts, the blooms gradually open and in so doing turn and arrange themselves in the vase, still retaining their beauty even when almost dead, at every stage of their life delightful. I used to like freesias for their scent (and ...

Diary

Stephen Frears: That's Hollywood, 20 December 1990

... prospective employers would start to pay. I flew to New York on Concorde, pausing only to buy new Green Flash sneakers in Hounslow. I had done this when I flew to New York for the Dangerous Liaisons interview over lunch at the Carlyle Hotel, and it had brought me luck. I arrived two hours before I left, and half an hour after I got to my Central Park South ...

Ellipticity

C.K. Stead, 10 June 1993

Remembering Babylon 
by David Malouf.
Chatto, 200 pp., £14.99, May 1993, 0 7011 5883 2
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... the new man Jock has become, he begins to see things in the natural world previously unnoticed: green insects on grass tips, a bird drawing long silver threads out of the running water of a stream. These perceptions are ‘like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. It was unnameable, which disturbed him, but was also exhilarating.’ The change ...

Diary

Tobias Jones: Campaigning at the Ministry of Sound, 6 March 1997

... repeal sections of the Criminal Justice Act was subsequently endorsed by the Lib Dem leadership. Green issues, too, have galvanised opposition to the Tory Government, with the road-protester ‘Swampy’, suddenly an icon for all enemies of the motor-car. At the 1994 Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton a motion was passed calling for a royal commission ...

Why Wapping?

Rex Winsbury, 6 March 1986

... unions not being secured, the papers would band together to set up a new printing works on a ‘green field site’ using the latest technology, and tough it out together against the unions. Plan B fell foul of the inability of the Fleet Street proprietors to work together, and never got much beyond boardroom discussion. It was left to Rupert Murdoch ...

Diary

Sophie Smith: A Free Speech Agenda, 12 August 2021

... remarks and the charge by the England footballer Tyrone Mings that the government had given ‘the green light to racism’ only to feign outrage when faced with the consequences. The feigning continued. ‘I do not genuinely think the Honourable Lady is accusing either the prime minister of this country or, indeed, the home secretary of racism,’ Atkins ...

In No Hurry

Charles Glass: Anthony Shadid, 21 February 2013

House of Stone 
by Anthony Shadid.
Granta, 336 pp., £14.99, August 2012, 978 1 84708 735 5
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... called Miqbal, Abdullah, Hana and Najiba were naming their children Gladys, George, Pauline and David (as well as the all-American ‘Junior’). Yet of all the Shadid and Samara descendants only Anthony felt compelled to return to Marjayoun. Rooting himself in the soil of his family history, he hoped, would compensate for the peripatetic life of the ...

Believe it or not

Rebecca Mead: America’s National Story Project, 7 February 2002

True Tales of American Life 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 416 pp., £16.99, November 2001, 0 571 21050 3
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... serve as the title for dozens of the stories in this book. A man loses a one-of-a-kind Star of David while swimming at Atlantic City; ten years later, he finds it in an antique store in upstate New York. A woman living in Washington DC is mistaken by a stranger for another woman; years later, in San Francisco, the same stranger bumps into her and repeats ...

The Statistical Gaze

Helen McCarthy: The British Census, 29 June 2017

The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-Maker: The Story of Britain through Its Census, since 1801 
by Roger Hutchinson.
Little, Brown, 352 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 1 4087 0701 2
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... that ‘a man that can suck that in will believe, literally believe, that the moon is made of green cheese.’ As late as 1931, it was discovered that one enumerator, committed to a mental hospital, had prepared fictitious returns in order to avoid, in the registrar-general’s phrase, ‘the difficulty of obtaining them from the public’. Despite their ...

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