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“... trotting round the edge of a precipice; he was a primitive: how did he come to be the patron saint of modern art? His diaries can now be read for the first time in their original form. Joan Acocella’s restoration is a job very well done: she has elegantly failed to spare the blushes of the dead, and instead what we have is a final, proper edition of ...”

“... characteristics, height included, was not actively involved in the debate, but, as the patron saint of the biometricians’ cause, his name was frequently invoked. It wasn’t until after his death that the rancorous controversy was laid to rest by the realisation that continuous characteristics such as height are typically influenced by large numbers of ...”

“... largely considered. Carey tells of a drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden. There are other reports of barely credible drunken violence and insult. Sometimes it ...”

“... universe. For example, neither King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Wagner’s patron) nor Camille Saint-Saëns (Liszt’s protégé), both of whom were notorious queens, comes across that way. In a weird way, Walker’s three volumes can be reduced to a laundry list of Lisztian corrections. He was not descended from aristocrats; he never met Schubert; he did ...”

“... itself. The admission of rival sentiments comes to appear merely a nuance of the mind’s habit. Andrew Motion’s way of making sense is to imagine something, then something else apparently quite different, and let the poem accommodate both imaginings with or without specifying the relation between them. A girl and her father, quarrelling; the girl and a ...”

“... of stone that play a major part in Painting in Stone. The marble floor of the Chapel of St Andrew in Westminster Cathedral.  University of Oxford, Museum of Natural History First, there are the alabasters, which are relatively soft. These are now divided into gypsum alabaster and calcite or onyx alabaster. Calcite alabaster from Egypt, commonly a ...”

“... of sheets to the wind, he joked about the reception he expected. ‘You know, in Spain, I’m a saint.’ With his dark beard and gaunt profile – amoebic dysentery, or a giardiasis, perhaps? – he could have stepped straight from a Goya canvas, but I must have looked sceptical. ‘No, really,’ he insisted, making a sweeping gesture with his frosted ...”

“... who uses fiction philosophically rather than someone who, let’s say, just writes it. A glance at Andrew Brown’s excellent translation of The Wall and/or at the French text shows us at once what we have been missing, and the glance very quickly turns into a long look.* It’s hard to stop reading. The title of the book is that of the opening story, set in ...”

“... next to Jackson in age, a swaggering cocky fighter dressed in cowboy gear – and something of a saint. His destiny, it seemed, was to look after his baby brother. He had done it when they were children. It was a dirtier business now. ‘There was something ... provocative in Sande’s solicitude, a licence to screw up that Jackson understood only too ...”

“... as the ascendancy of man-made industrial society and the obliteration of the old natural order. Andrew Wilton, the author of Turner in His Time, considered the painting’s perspective as indicative of the triumph of the new: ‘The plunging diagonal line that cuts across the familiar location here is an emphatic demonstration of how the new technologies of ...”

“... To the modern world Andrew Marvell is a poet. Earlier times knew him differently. From his death in 1678 until the late Victorian era he was mainly admired not for his poetry but for his politics. The 18th and 19th centuries commemorated him as the MP and prose-writer who had challenged tyranny and corruption and religious persecution in the reign of Charles II ...”

“... came in the end to add to the myth of her specialness. In her own lifetime she became the patron saint of sex; and afterwards, in her very modern martyrdom, she made us feel that an engulfing sadness does not in any way preclude a giant success. Marilyn’s fans find the combination fatal. And so unfortunately did she. Encyclopedias exist to bring a constant ...”

“... trying to establish ‘phalansteries’ that would render the division of labour obsolete. The Saint-Simonians in Ménilmontant were seeking a fusion of free love with the ‘fraternal’ ideals of medieval Christianity and the productive capacities of modern industry. New thinking was accompanied by new forms of community and collective action. Excluded ...”

“... work by established names like John Buchan, as well as by newcomers like Grieve and his brother Andrew, whose verse (as Bold points out) Grieve later viciously attacked. Eventually, Andrew would break permanently with Christopher, describing him (with some justice) as ‘megalomaniac’. By 1920, Grieve was employed as a ...”

“... rectitude overtook him and at one time he became, in Joseph Paxton’s words, a ‘ranting saint’. He was a great territorial magnate and a patron of the arts, but never a mover and shaker. He has not hitherto been accorded a biography, other than in Violet Markham’s Paxton and the Bachelor Duke. The DNB gives him less space than it devotes to many ...”