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“... the subject as the campanile that reaches up into it, and Burne-Jones’s The Merciful Knight. John Frederick Lewis, who spent ten years in Cairo amassing drawings of Oriental life, came home and turned them into images like Hhareem Life, Constantinople, in which the detail is abundant and accurate but the atmosphere suburban English. In the end he gave up ...”

“... copies of Vogue, with black and white photographs by Penn, Avedon and Horst, and drawings by John Ward, Bouché, Eric and the rest, are still my best notion of what a sophisticated magazine should look like. The Post, with its Rockwell covers and advertisements for refrigerators of giant size, finned cars, and kitchens in which slim housewives lived the ...”

“... Gwen John’s attic bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light, Hammershøi’s frugal Danish ones and Van Gogh’s narrow bedroom: these are pictures you might choose if exiled to a desert island. Thinking of the inviting effect such paintings have I went looking for them in the National Gallery ...”

“... a clean air act, or want to commiserate about the bad weather, as George VI did when he looked at John Piper’s drawings of Windsor Castle. You are struck by the observation of things that had not been seen before, or seen rarely, in pictures: things like the backs of the South London houses where Carel Weight set odd encounters that could have come from ...”

“... in a wholesale way only once. It was dressed in stucco when new, under the general direction of John Nash. It formed the central portion of his grand north-south route from Regent’s Park to Carlton House (demolished in 1827, only a year after the building work in Regent Street was complete). The Victorians made inroads on Nash’s scheme; the Quadrant ...”

“... was now, as Gaston Tissandier put it in his History and Handbook of Photography of 1879 (quoted in John Falconer’s admirable and informative introduction to the catalogue), safe from the danger of being ‘modified and disfigured by an untrustworthy pencil’. Moreover the task of recording the monuments of India, which seemed doomed to defeat by the sheer ...”

“... think in the exhibition of architects’ drawings from the Barbara Pine collection, at Sir John Soane’s Museum until 27 August. The most interesting and liveliest are sketches which take you close to the moment of invention. These, like the material at Tate Modern, are early moves, unresolved and sometimes tentative. Frank Gehry’s 1982 ‘Study for ...”

“... which includes the dress with its black calyx-like bodice out of which white shoulders flower in John Singer Sargent’s portrait Madame X: a dress as famous as the Versace, and more scandalous. The anxiety/hope that a woman may fall out of her frock goes back further still. In Aurora Leigh, ‘that bilious Grimwald’ (a critic) observes the villainous Lady ...”

“... like Eileen Gray’s lacquer and silver-leaf ‘pirogue’ daybed, and some practical, like John R. Morgan’s Waterwitch outboard motor. The details which make it possible to put these, not to mention any number of smart frocks, showy cigarette cases, smoothly engraved glass vases and bits of geometric architectural decoration, under the one heading ...”

“... by an unreality which can seem pernicious. A Constable sketch hanging nearby, and even Edward John Gregory’s jolly picture of boating on the Thames, Sargent’s picture of a boy by a river and Munnings’s Friesian Bull, all of which say more about the look of things and less about dream worlds, are not so embarrassing.Lever’s collecting was not ...”

“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... bursaries, but his advisers also wanted evidence of skill. One of them, however, suggested he see John Reed. Reed was a solicitor, interested in Modernism. He lived with his wife Sunday in a house called Heide, in Heidelberg, a semi-rural community outside Melbourne – it had given its name to the Heidelberg School of Australian painters in the late 19th ...”

“... of that too: ‘Dario and I opened at the Persian Room of the Plaza on 10 June 1935. The next day, John McClain telephoned ... Pepi had just killed herself by jumping out of a window of the psychiatric section of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Looking in the mirror as I checked my hair, make-up and costume for the dinner show, I thought, her ...”

“... might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de ...”

“... include one of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, as spectators at the trial of fellow radical John Thelwall, that shows every sign of being done swiftly, but delicately, on the spot; portraits like that of Mary Hamilton, made in 1789, show his flattering response to pretty women in full, early bloom. A study for Satan as the Fallen Angel shows why ...”