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“... regiment or publisher, or who (having slavered with the best of them over the early flowering of Jones minor) is now a sleek and rotund editor of something like the Times or the Spectator. Peregrine Worsthorne, in this rather idle but charming book,* strives to come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling ...”

“... early 1850s fired the imaginations of the Oxford undergraduates William Morris and Edward Burne Jones. But De Morgan was enrolled at University College, where there was no scope for picturesque medievalism. The spirit of place did not haunt Gower Street. Having failed to get a degree, De Morgan decided to become a painter. He made friends among the second ...”

“... to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones has a slightly different version of the same story, like anyone who heard it from Clough himself. In his two autobiographies, Architect Errant (1971) and the even more errant Around the World in Ninety Years (1978), there are different versions, although in ...”

“... and in Madron (the latter given to him and Nessie rent-free for life by the painter Nancy Wynne-Jones), as Graham became less and less inclined to move about. Though he craved new experiences and foreign travel, he couldn’t cope with either, however much he savoured his memories of travel. His trips to Iceland in 1961 and to Crete three years later (more ...”

“... a swelling proportion of the massive costs of warfare onto the poor, ensured the survival of the Norman Yoke. Yet the attitude of Paine and other radicals to the Revolution was ambivalent. They celebrated the centenary of 1688 even as they strove to subvert its legacy. For the English tradition of popular radicalism owes more than it and its historians have ...”

“... didn’t usually bother to do their reading. In the documents collected here only the report on Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago delivers the scrutiny a literary hack might apply, with attention paid to ‘his usual obscene and bitter style’. Elsewhere, agents crib from newspaper reviews and interviews and watch their subjects on TV. They ...”

“... to be mysterious. The landlord, McCandless, is a mystery man. Very like McLeod, the old Marxist in Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore, McCandless is pursued by avenging spirits from his dissident past: he seems to have been a geologist, engaged in dirty business in Africa, and his dissidence is expressed in great wrath about ‘religion’, the stupid things his ...”

“... endless newspaper sketches. On 27 April, for example, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post was Norman Rockwell’s depiction of a census-taker making notes as a large woman counts on her fingers the names of the red-headed, freckled children who peek out all around her. Their irrepressible liveliness threatens to overwhelm the little man in the too-big ...”

“... any longer cared to try for this sort of thing. Lawrence Gowing, writing of a painting by Thomas Jones who was in Rome a century and a half earlier, explains: ‘The normal way of gathering information about nature is in a drawing, but this oil sketch is nothing like a drawing. It is based not on line but on solid colour matched in value and hue to visual ...”

“... wonderful storyteller though he is, Munthe must in many respects have been insufferable in person. Norman Douglas, for example, one of his expatriate neighbours on Capri, thought him a ‘portentous fake’. In 1928, Victoria wrote to Hilda that ‘the conceitedness & self-satisfaction are alas! increasing more and more.’ Nearly twenty years later, Hilda ...”

“... in from the east, laced with strontium-90, and if it was safe to go out in it. At school we read Norman Nicholson’s poem about the Windscale fire of 1957: ‘The toadstool towers infest the shore:/Stink-horns that propagate and spore/Wherever the wind blows.’ By the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, though, the fear had moved on, to the greenhouse ...”

“... on the gossamer constructions of current art theory? You get ringing in your ears when you read Norman Bryson, and fear you have caught Ménière’s disease off the page? Do not despair. There is a remedy. The second posthumous volume of Edgar Wind’s essays outdoes even its sumptuous predecessor in intellectual glitter and academic burnishing. Only 120 ...”

“... a prolonged siege. Although monetarist economists and cost accountants may feel reasonably safe, Norman Tebbit has recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social sciences has involved the once-mighty Social Science Research Council in acronymic self-torture. If the ...”

“... playing games with decades is a relatively harmless activity, although best done (as by Norman Shrapnel) chiefly for amusement. An eccentric eye will always spot the eccentricities of the times, and Shrapnel possesses also a sharp pair of scissors for the newspaper cutting. Snip and you have, for example, the violent spirit of the time: Bath ...”

“... forms, including a kind of nervous male bluster masquerading as chivalry. When Mervyn Griffith-Jones put his famous question to the Lady Chatterley trial jury about the reading-matter appropriate to wives and servants, he may have had in mind the criteria applied by a Sunday Times editor in 1949 to The Naked and the Dead. ‘No decent man could leave it ...”