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“... for Christopher Penfold The Queen and the Philosopher Sun on the sea running white, sun on white walls, yes, on the thick shoulders of the fishermen as they fanned their nets, sun as an engine, a trapdoor, a compass, Democritus in his cell the window framing sea and sky, blue climbing on blue, a glaze shaken by the heat, as she drifted in and held heavy in the thickening air ...”

“... polite – first of all – as they reached the landing. Evangeline was addressing me as ‘Norman Darling’. My mother said: ‘You know she was married to Jerry! She’s talking nonsense.’ ‘Norman!’ Dad said. ‘I didn’t think you wanted us to see her.’ I noted Evangeline’s breasts, shoulders, arms and ...”

“... G.E. Street, a designer of great fluency who in the words of Webb’s successor in the post, Norman Shaw, never let his pupils design so much as a keyhole. That was a principle which Webb came also to adopt. On graduating from Oxford, Morris briefly fancied becoming an architect and put himself under Street, who handed him on to Webb. Something of the ...”

“... In the current issue of a magazine called The Face there is an article on Norman Mailer’s recent visit to this country. He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting ...”

“... influence of Whig historians Englishness is now a matter of the shrill nativism of a forgotten white working class, and the pained nostalgia of the elderly, who can remember a straight-faced version of our ‘island’ story. Even if England has never been an island, a vagueness about the contours of its political geography was for centuries a core ...”

“... list of mugshots, exposing the real powers behind Zog. My own name appeared next to that of Norman Podhoretz. Momentarily chilling as it was to feel ‘wanted’ by these people (let alone to be gazetted with Podhoretz), the overwhelming impression was of crankiness cut with impotent, pitiable hatred.No longer. The Oklahoma detonation has exposed the ...”

“... nothing can console us, when we think it over.’ Even in his favourite ice-cream sundae, a ‘white lady’, the hero has found an emblem of disintegration. I watched the white lady melting. Watched the vanilla melt imperceptibly under the topping of hot chocolate. Watched the scoop of ice-cream, almost perfectly round ...”

“... Has any other contemporary designer ‘signed’ as many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Perhaps no architect since Christopher Wren has affected the London skyline so dramatically, from the Swiss Re ‘gherkin’ to the new Wembley Stadium arch. Foster has a right to be immodest, and the Catalogue of his work is punctuated with adjectives like ‘first’ and ‘largest’, and verbs like ‘reinvent’ and ‘redefine ...”

“... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep ...”

“... wear the ‘absurdly uncomfortable’ clothes into which the Victorian child was squeezed, the ‘white piqué starched frocks’ and the velvet hair ribbons ‘fastened with a bit of elastic looped over a button behind the ear’ that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. Peter Rabbit’s expression of ...”

“... at lower altitudes, all scrambled down over steep, weed-slathered rocks to the landing place. Norman, the mate, brought the tender over to carry us back to the boat. The Poplar Voyager is a 90-foot steel motor yacht, built apparently for some millionaire whose wife decided she didn’t like it. Now it belongs to Bob Theakston, who’s been sailing these ...”

“... The National Portrait Gallery​ has put up a dozen or so photographs by Norman Parkinson to accompany the publication of Portraits in Fashion,* an overview of his contribution to fashion photography, the category to which the greater part of his work belongs. He began as a court photographer, taking pictures of debs, but pretty soon went to work for magazines ...”

“... international affairs at Princeton and a former assistant director for national security in the White House, ‘Iraq had difficulty producing reliable [centrifuge] machines’ and ‘no [centrifuge] production facility had been established by the time the effort was halted by the bombings.’ Iraq would have had to have solved many technical problems at a ...”

“... perhaps, another kind of conquest: an African American painter’s entrance into the gallery’s white cube space – a ‘house’ which, over the last decade or so, has been undergoing a belated desegregation. ‘Painting (11.30.92)’ Jackson’s large-scale ‘white space’ paintings achieve something like the ...”

“... remorselessly, he has been on the wrong side of the entire US Government, of the New Republic, of Norman Podhoretz, of nearly every journalist of note, left, right and centre, of the New York Times, of the McNeil-Lehrer Report (see in particular his devastating replication of that TV programme’s famous ‘balance’, with the ponderously sober ...”