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“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... contemporary power with glamour and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre ...”

“... can be no doubt that it is to this notion, so absurd and bizarre, that we owe the existence of Raphael and Correggio.’ This observation, thrown out by Stendhal in his life of Rossini, deserves the attention of all students of the altarpiece. Most altarpieces, after all, do come from such private chapels and the saints depicted on them determine their ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”

“... half of the 20th century. In The Enemy Within, an account of the 1984-85 strike he co-edited, Raphael Samuel claimed that over decades the Scottish and Welsh coalfields produced men with their ‘own distinctive version of militancy – more “educated”, more communist, more statesman-like’ than their English counterparts. One possible expression of ...”

“... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...”

“... among different kinds of writers in the Eighties and early Nineties must be understood. As Raphael Samuel has remarked, it was less Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands War that put questions of patriotism and national identity on the agenda in a new way than the Thatcherites’ dereliction of so many previously-accepted patriotic norms.Yet none of us is immune ...”

“... something much deeper and blacker, that we all respected’. In an obituary of the sculptor David Smith he describes the good times they had and adds: ‘we both knew damned well the black abyss in each of us that the sun and the daughters’ skin and the bounty and the drink could alleviate but not begin to fill, a certain kind, I suppose of ...”

“... as precious stones.’ The ambition is breathtaking, its objects less so. I would like to believe David Erdman that even Pitt guiding Behemoth is meant as Satanic allegory, with its naked British hero putting, as always, an angelic face on Chaos and Non-Entity. But I have my doubts. Perhaps the verdict of time on the Pitt and Nelson pictures – the one, to ...”

“... clothing’ – outclassed paintings in the category of pictorial arts: a set of tapestries after Raphael’s designs (woven in gold and silver, to be sure) was valued at nearly triple the price of the artist’s painting, The Holy Family, though Raphael’s were among the most highly sought-after paintings in the ...”

“... that the revolution at the Portrait Gallery had already begun under Strong’s predecessor, David Piper (who went on to become director of the Fitzwilliam and later the Ashmolean Museums). Piper had, after all, sponsored Strong’s first ‘theatrical’ exhibition, ‘The Winter Queen’, while he was still a junior keeper, encouraged him to start ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... latter was our only record Vasari’s enthusiasm would be mysterious in a way that admiration for Raphael’s lost drawing of the Judgment of Paris, for example, which we only know from Marcantonio’s engraving, is not. Titian employed engravers – in particular Cornelis Cort, who learnt to match the light and shade of his paintings in graduated lines and ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”