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“... then just out of his teens; a couple of years earlier he had been sought out by an older artist, John Linnell, who had seen and admired his work. Palmer wrote that God had sent Linnell ‘to pluck me from the pit of modernity’. Through Linnell, who was his friend and patron and later his father-in-law, Palmer met William Blake. It was the light of Blake ...”

“... in Flat Earth News. Davies, informed by his knowledge of PR, even has a fresh angle on Alastair Campbell and the Kelly affair. In his account, ‘Campbell used it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass ...”

“... and the spread of industrial cities could make no aesthete happy. But Lancaster, and friends like John Betjeman and John Piper, were part of the movement that encouraged action. Neither Preservation Societies nor the refinement of planning zones could do much about making a new world to their taste, but they did safeguard ...”

“... archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys? Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of tablets may be the ...”

“... blue room; a Hopper of a woman in an empty theatre; Witness, a smashed face by Jenny Saville; and John Currin’s Rotterdam – pornography as Norman Rockwell might have painted it. There are installations, such as Damien Hirst’s table of surgical instruments below photographs of a smashed eye and smashed limbs. There are DVD projections and sculpture. This ...”

“... it clear what religious images should do in the world: inspire devotion and emulation. Saints – John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila – had used them as stimulants to spirituality. In Alonso Cano’s The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, the saint kneels before a painted statue of the Virgin and Child. She directs a thin stream of milk ...”

“... blow over. Christopher Cochran, a conservation architect, showed me a picture of the church of St John Rangitukia which did blow over. The locals pulled it back to its feet. Now wooden props like flying buttresses prepare it for the next storm.Just as England’s Navy outgrew the country’s ability to supply oak, so in New Zealand building and exports ...”

“... Towne (there are a couple of his pictures in the exhibition, so you can make comparisons) and John Sell Cotman. He took from them – or so one guesses – ideas about the relation of watercolour wash to the drawn structure underneath, and a way of simplifying landscape into a pattern. In his work for Wedgwood and in his illustrations he offered a ...”

“... wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it reflected a glass roof. You walk into it down a narrowing, steel-walled, waist-high passage, where black oil rises to the rim and stretches out all around you. The tank is neatly tailored to follow the room’s walls, mouldings and ...”

“... When Hans Schmoller​ first saw a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – the book was published in 1972 – he hurled it across the room. Schmoller, who had succeeded Jan Tschichold as designer at Penguin in 1949, was a subtle practitioner of traditional book design. His pages were balanced, proper and elegant ...”

“... and park-side buildings are most generous to the changing appearance of the people around them, is John Nash. His career can be followed in the pictures in the late Michael Mansbridge’s illustrated catalogue of everything which has any claim to be by him.* He seems to have designed – in Great Russell Street – the first London buildings in which all the ...”

“... Chartered Accountants were a young professional organisation when, in 1888, they commissioned John Belcher to design their Institute on a site behind Moorgate. It is bordered by narrow streets – Great Swan Alley and Moorgate Place. The architect and the sculptor he commissioned, Hamo Thornycroft, were both members of the Art Workers’ Guild, and ...”

“... Philippe de Champaigne gave when his daughter became a Jansenist nun – a Mary Magdalene and a John the Baptist – are in the exhibition. Neil MacGregor’s catalogue notes shed light on the choice of saints and make sense of their decorous presentation and of the place art could have among the spiritually frugal. St ...”

“... is, or was, recognised by one kind of how-to-draw book. I have before me How to Draw Horses by John Skeaping, first published in 1941; this seventh impression is dated 1946. In the same series of twenty or so titles were How to Draw ‘Planes by Frank Wootton and Tanks and How to Draw Them by Terence Cuneo – both highly successful workers in long-lasting ...”

“... agreeable pictures: recent purchases include a very neat, pretty oil painting of the shop of John Young and Sons, fishmongers, by the 19th-century Swiss artist Jacques-Laurent Agasse (the Queen owns his best-known picture, which is of a giraffe) and Compulsory Obsolescence, a meticulous drawing by Michael Landy in which he has copied line by line, letter ...”