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“... English plans for a treaty of peace and collective security to be signed by all Europe’s major powers. At its heart was a new Anglo-French alliance of ‘perpetual friendship’ in which Henry’s daughter Mary was betrothed to the French dauphin. The two kings, the treaty stipulated, were to meet in person as ‘brothers in arms’. Wolsey had ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... an early hint of an important component of religious thought: immanence. Gods and supernatural powers can be inside statues, mountains, lakes, seas, nature itself, and of course people.’ We also have here – though the fact does not concern Lewis-Williams – our earliest evidence of systematic line-drawing. The ends of the blocks were flattened to make ...”

“... they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’ The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price ...”

“... of those accused of grave crimes and to wish to see them punished, it does not enhance one’s powers of observation. All court systems that function well do so because they are well supervised: by governments, parliaments and, most important, by a vigorous press. The international courts established by the UN, and the permanent International Criminal ...”

“... different piece on the piano in case his memory attracted attention. Even more impressive were his powers of improvisation. Though he thought extemporising in public an ‘absurdity’, it was his stock-in-trade. In private, on one of his many visits to London, he wowed a nine-year-old pianist with 20 spontaneous variations on ‘Bluebells of ...”

“... starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next morning makes this seem less likely, in part because the classic phase of his career ended ...”

“... which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’). But what of the ‘perpetual confinement’ as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage ...”

“... Tower had its 15 minutes of fame in 2013 when a helicopter, on the way to pick up the tycoon Richard Caring, hit it in fog and crashed, killing the pilot and a pedestrian on his way to work. It is a building so ugly and so out of place – so disproportionate, so brutally disrespectful of its environment and context – that you will, if you pass it ...”

“... Socialist Realism and the realism of contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Richard Prince, who celebrate ‘the total fetishisation of object relations’, but maintains a more ambiguous relationship with formalism in which he ‘attempts to imbue abstract painting with a mnemonic dimension, commemorating, if nothing else, at least its ...”

“... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the ...”

“... painting looked even more absurd than it did before. As critics such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer have stressed, this queering of art was also a matter of content. If the persona behind Abstract Expressionism was the ‘action painter’ in existential torment, Warhol put pretty-boy idols of mass culture up front, such as the young Troy Donahue ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... of Christ should be seen as his ‘entrance into enemy territory’, an ‘undermining’ of the powers of the world, like a Royal Engineer tunnelling under German lines. Reading the gospel story, ‘we are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice … for the story of ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”