Search Results

“... It then moves to Poland with a critical sketch of the beginning of Walesa’s Presidency – the former leaders of Solidarity ‘belabouring each other with rusty clubs’, amid potentially hopeful signs of a Thatcherite economy under his authoritarian rule. An account of its unthinkable sequel follows: the victory of the post-Communist Aleksander Kwasniecki ...”

“... one’s own direct experience of its subject-matter. I therefore make full use of mine, as a pupil at Shrewsbury School in the Fifties. In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench,* one-time headmaster of Eton, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals’. Another ...”

“... who said he knew what had provoked Crown Prince Dipendra, supposed incarnation of Vishnu and former pupil at Eton, to mass murder. On the night of 1 June 2001, Dipendra appeared in the drawing-room of the royal palace in Kathmandu, dressed in combat fatigues, apparently out of it on Famous Grouse and hashish, and armed with assault rifles and ...”

“... Van Dyck the Antwerp prodigy, precocious master of the northern baroque, Rubens’s star pupil, a painter of mythologies and altarpieces – not just of portraits. In England, where Van Dyck spent most of the last decade of his 42 years, the demand for other genres was limited but the appetite for portraits was voracious. He became, like Holbein ...”

“... associated with the Royal Ballet. One name was conspicuous by its absence: Liam Scarlett, the former Royal Ballet artist-in-residence. In March 2020, following accusations of inappropriate behaviour over the previous decade, the company had severed ties with him. Other companies followed suit. In April this year it was announced that Scarlett, who was ...”

“... assistants how to draw, and there are individual sheets which seem to show the work of master and pupil. The distinction between different hands is not always easy to make, and art historians tend to credit Michelangelo himself only with those elements that seem particularly confident and accomplished. This assumption may not necessarily be correct, because ...”

“... long room with incredibly neat bookshelves, I’d never seen so many books in my life.’ A former classmate quoted in the biography recalls that fellow pupils he occasionally helped over the small intricacies of language referred to him affectionately as ‘Dictionary’. Achebe senior had been a collector of all literary trivia. As the fifth in a ...”

“... there is Jan, a young man who has admired Kristýna since the time when he was her husband’s pupil and saw her waiting with Jana’s pram outside his school. When he happens to catch sight of her again 15 years later, his infatuation revives, and he begins to waylay her with bunches of flowers. They start an affair. She worries about being 15 years older ...”

“... and which fully justify their reissue in this expanded form. Elizabeth Wilson is a cellist (a pupil of Rostropovich) who lived and studied in Moscow for seven years in the late 1960s and early 1970s (her father, Duncan Wilson, was British ambassador for some of that period). By the time she went back to Russia at the end of the 1980s to conduct her ...”

“... from state socialism was among the smoothest in Eastern Europe. Hungary spent the 1990s as a model pupil of the West, finally joining the EU in 2004. Now, almost a decade on, it is led by the charismatic, self-declared ‘right-wing plebeian’ Viktor Orbán, a man whom critics charge with the ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Thanks to his government’s ...”

“... own history, and he means to write them back in. He draws vividly on interviews with musicians, former child soldiers, political activists and people old enough to remember the days of the Belgian Congo, including a man who claimed (plausibly) to be 126 years old. Congo, Van Reybrouck insists, is more than the ‘world’s storehouse’: it has ‘played a ...”

“... was the Salvator Mundi, a serene and ringletted image of Christ formerly considered the work of a pupil or imitator, but now – after restoration, analysis and a substantial helping of hype – attributed to the brush of the master. No sooner had this excitement died down than the long-running saga of Leonardo’s lost mural The Battle of Anghiari was back ...”

“... expected to fail to be above zero, and that even a percentage that equated to less than one pupil would require someone to be downgraded to a fail.The various algorithms that Ofqual considered were compared by testing how accurate they would have been if applied to students who took exams in 2019. It wasn’t possible to test the process completely ...”

“... at Heidelberg, Jaspers could tackle the question of guilt and complicity head on. Although bitter former Nazis such as Carl Schmitt dismissed him as a ‘repentance preacher’ (Bussprediger) and later commentators have found fault with aspects of his analysis, he was the first major figure to grapple with the enormity of the ...”

“... floral embroideries adorning his hostesses’ bustle gowns. A great caesura, however, divided the former phase of his career from the latter: that has long been the first datum in all discussions of the artist. For seven years from 1848 the zealous young convert to medievalism yoked a virtually cloisonniste patchwork colouring to jagged, insistently awkward ...”