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“... and Berra at St Petersburg, from 1967, on show at Piano Nobile, are the equivalents of the music hall subjects beloved by Sickert. Kitaj’s portrait of Auden from 1968 is one of the best of these painted drawings. He visited him in California with Hockney, whose ink portrait from the same sitting gives more emphasis to Auden’s sagging face. (‘If ...”

“... out of line, then he must be called to order. Bemedalled idiots and vain perfumed coxcombs have no place in our war leadership ... For instance it is simply grossly bad style for the senior officer of the Reich, in the present wartime situation, to strut around in a silver-grey uniform. It would seem, from the apposite allusion to ‘the dandiacal ...”

“... had come to her, in 1909, as a wedding present. Her script was an imperfect copperplate. There was no connection between the way she spoke (or, I suspect, thought) and the way she wrote. The only letter I ever had from her – a one-page note during my National Service – was probably a replica of what she dimly recalled writing to her husband while he was at ...”

“... houses as the background for scenes of Christmas revelry where the classes mingled in the great hall. This was a thinly veiled attack on the exclusivity of the ‘polite’, classical culture of the 18th and early 19th centuries, when magnates distanced themselves from their inferiors, ceased to share their festivities with their tenantry and either closed ...”

“... suggest that maybe there is nothing to tell, only telling itself. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall say they agree with Michel Foucault that ‘sex must be understood as discursively produced.’ (Actually, I don’t think they do agree, but more about that later.) If we take the point, then the history of sexual knowledge becomes the history of the making ...”

“... to turn the art into the man. In this, he is not unlike those actual Elizabethan writers – Hall, Nashe, Greene – who created a whole great literary Elizabethan world of non-art, hardly read today but still well worth reading. In any fertile age there is a great deal of it, and our own is no exception. But ...”

“... shut behind her. Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John, who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view. In John’s unfinished mural Lyric Fantasy, painted soon after her death, Ida stands to one side of the group of women and children who make ...”

“... In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... endeavour. This happened belatedly in part because the traditional academic disciplines had no obvious place, role or receptacle for such amorphous collections as publishers amass. There are no departments of publishing history in this country and only a few research centres or learned journals devoted to it. Another ...”

“... his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright. (The children of enslaved women ...”

“... to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves spontaneously reinventing Stuart Hall. Since he arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951, Hall has been the sort of radical they might have despatched from Central Casting. Charming, charismatic, formidably bright and probably the most electrifying public ...”

“... wilderness.) The last of his three successive residences, finished in 1763 and known as Johnson Hall, was an elegant Georgian structure, surrounded by satellite ‘lodges’ and other outbuildings; close by was the village of Johnstown, which he had founded for the benefit of his many tenants and retainers. His personal life was ...”

“... surprised in we can’t guess what macabre rite of love. Whether or not this shot helped inspire John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire one doesn’t know; Irving, author of The World according to Garp, already had his own surreal interest in bears, as in his early novel Setting Free the Bears. At all events, a girl who wears all day (and night) a shaggy ...”

“... If there had been a police presence at the Feeding of the Five Thousand there would have been no miracle. ‘Listen, there were only a dozen or so people there. Five loaves and two fishes perfectly adequate.’ 28 January. A photograph in the Independent of Picasso painting Guernica in 1937 in a collar and tie. 30 January. My friend Anne’s funeral and ...”