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“... threshold. In the seclusion of prayer and study, the painting suggests, the world reveals all its riches. I felt rather jealous.Little is known about the artist who painted this image. Antonello was born in the harbour city of Messina in Sicily around 1430 and died in 1479. No more than forty of his paintings survive and they are widely dispersed. Relatively ...”

“... citizens of the Commonwealth in 1948. In his documentary The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, David Olusoga observed that the 1948 British Nationality Act was intended to attract Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who would be easily absorbed into the majority population, restoring Britain’s manpower after the war, while keeping it ...”

“... comparisons and aptly-chosen examples, Briggs has built up an unrivalled panorama of the range and riches of Victorian life. But what has given Briggs’s work its real immediacy and appeal is that, regardless of the particular subject about which he may be writing, the present and the past have always come together in his work in such a way that he has been ...”

“... exclude that particular thread from the multicoloured skein of English achievement. Sunrising, by David Cook, is also a first historical novel, though its author has received justifiable praise for earlier writings like the dramatically successful Walter. You could say that it was written from a very different point in the political spectrum from ...”

“... characters are in some ways at odds with this sombre progression in which the multiplication of riches brings about a radical impoverishment of the human values it treats as commodities. Apple makes Walt Disney an important figure whose solitary brooding undercuts the fast-operating market-thinking of his brother Will. For Walt, speaking in interviews to ...”

“... In​ the early 18th century, Bordeaux was a rapidly expanding and prosperous city. Its riches derived from the business of slavery, and the city changed to accommodate this business. The port was renovated to make room for the large ships travelling to Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Domingue; work began on what was to be the magnificent Place de la Bourse on the Garonne and on the new merchant houses and shops for the luxury trades ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... bequeathing it to his estranged fourth wife, Lynne Frederick, who kept it all to herself, married David Frost with indecent haste and recently died in California of a drug overdose. So much for the facts. One of Roger Lewis’s main achievements in his new and frankly enormous biography – at least four times longer than any of the others – is to have ...”

“... facts: he needs to provide us with an alternative theory of the general ‘idea’ of the work.* David Aers is altogether more ambitious and more theoretically self-aware than Terry Jones, but he too rides a hobby-horse too hard, and in the process grows deaf to tone. Aers’s central argument is that great poets often speak truer than they ...”

“... Tourists seem usually to have been conducted within the endogamous British upper class, although David Hume made himself ridiculous by his unrequited passion for a Piedmontese countess and James Boswell did more than flirt with a Sienese lady foolish enough to fall for him. ‘Whore hunting amang groves o’ myrtles’ may have been as common as Burns ...”

“... to the camps. Paranoia has sharpened Blam’s perception, not just of life’s dangers but of its riches. From the rooftop, his fellow citizens on the street below appear to be ‘propelled by an unknown force … pulled on a transparent string by a concealed hand’. Close up, however, it’s evident that they contract their muscles and shift their weight to ...”

“... discomfort or guilt about worldly rewards? This, the theme of Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of Riches, is not inconsistent with the view that moral warnings against worldly pleasures lurk beneath the surfaces of the paintings. Dutch art in this account is an art of proscribing, not an art of describing. Combined with the assault on portrayal is another ...”

“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... thinking to the political culture of Germany – a country he had always loved for its cultural riches but from which, under the Nazis, he had been abruptly excluded. Symbolic Forms combines systematic theory with lavish documentation on an astonishing scale, and it soon became a beacon for ambitious initiatives in cultural theory, and art history in ...”

“... whole new ball game. With what mortifying surfeit do we find ourselves faced? An embarrassment of riches. The consequence is that we now know almost everything there is to know about Flann O’Brien; and out of this knowledge a story has emerged, a received narrative, which makes a more upsetting kind of sense than anything he ever wrote in his books. Our ...”