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“... such as John Minton who absorbed most from these works, and visionaries of a different sort – Cecil Collins, for example – who were able to go on tapping an analogous vein. Palmer’s gift to posterity was a kind of dream landscape, best seen in the early night scenes. It finds echoes in English romantic painting of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an ...”

“... Parliament. The argument against was rehearsed at the eleventh hour by Lord Chalfont, talking to David Dimbleby on BBC 1. Lord Chalfont was against the televising of the House of Lords because he suspected that it was just a stratagem on the part of the broadcasters so that they could force the door of the House of Commons, after which the House of ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed the art and business of pictures. I think this is Eyman’s best and most heartfelt book. And the reason these two biographies are so compelling is that the uneasy cut from Archie to Cary has ...”

“... as the end of the Boer innings. After touring India in 1903 with the Oxford University Authentics, Cecil Headlam was able to conclude that cricket ‘unites the ruler and the ruled. It also provides a moral training, an education in pluck and nerve and self-restraint far more valuable to the character of the ordinary native than the mere learning by heart of a ...”

“... is merely salacious innuendo: it is titillating but not informative. The only real plum is Cecil Beaton’s remarkable comment on Lily Elsie’s anaemia – ‘this was no doubt the reason for an unusually early menopause and for a certain frigidity’ – which should be a winner for the Guardian’s ‘Naked Ape’ column. Nor do the revelations on ...”

“... actions often pass unnoticed. One does notice, and wince, every time James addresses Sir Robert Cecil as ‘my little beagle’, or ‘my little wiffe-waffe’ – Cecil was five feet two or three, apparently malformed, and sensitive about all this. One does not notice that James had enough sense to keep ...”

“... had come from the ‘heart of government’. Not all the stratagems work. The attempt to retain Mr Cecil Parkinson in the Cabinet following the disclosure of his affair with his former secretary, Miss Sara Keays, was an epic failure. Newspaper enterprise swiftly scuppered the official line (‘the issue of Mr Parkinson’s resignation does not and will not ...”

“... his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more to Harpers & Queen. The fashion bubble of Sixties London was not quite the fourth dynasty or the historical watershed of the Crimean War. What was of interest ...”

“... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...”

“... first half of their first volume of A Social History of British Broadcasting Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff seem scarcely to try. As they tread the well-worn path through the BBC’s approaches – first as a company, then as a corporation – to politics and international affairs and the General Strike and the Abdication crisis and all the other familiar ...”

“... intervention. ‘The miracle happened in that film emulsion. Who knows why?’ Writing in 1975, David Thomson compared Garbo to Christ – there were times in their lives when all they wanted was to be left alone – before concluding with a reiteration of the same ‘mysterious truth’: ‘She was photographed. She was all in the silver.’ Whether Garbo ...”

“... in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at Birmingham University, she specialises in the study of early 19th-century popular protest, and her published work on the Chartist movement has been ‘written in general sympathy with ...”

“... as in the lion and the bull’, and then hints that this may be why Michelangelo portrayed David frowning. But surely an explanation would only be needed if David, who is waiting for the big kill, was not frowning. Summers also wants to believe that someone introduced the young Michelangelo to the 12th Olympic ...”