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“... in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor – so he gives us Cimabue discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World ...”

“... and taken some more, two sons of the dressmaker’s and a sister of La Maschiona’s seducer and a shepherd boy of 14 years old, and they had taken them into the mayor’s stable and had poured tins of petrol over the stable and set fire to it ...   The mayor’s stable was now a heap of ashes, and you still seemed to hear the lowing of the cows and the ...”

“... a voice at the start assures us that Robin Hood robbed the rich to feed the poor. But when Little John (a bear) asks Robin (a fox), ‘Are we good guys or bad guys?’ Robin hedges: ‘We never rob; we borrow a bit from those who can afford it.’ Later in the film, bad King John (a lion) tries to firm up the moral ...”

“... in 1968 and would stay in the role until 1999, developing plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Wendy Wasserstein and many others.When they joined forces, Richards was 63 and Wilson was 37. Every live wire goes dead without connections, and Richards had them. So Wilson could quit his job ...”

“... When John Aubrey discovered that Milton had written some panegyrics of Cromwell and Fairfax, he eagerly sought them out for their ‘sublime’ quality: ‘were they made in commendation of the Devil, ’twere all one to me: ’tis the hypsos that I look after.’ Aubrey’s brief lives of the leaders of the Puritan revolution retain something of his youthful excitement at the sublimity, the magnanimity in defence of liberty, aspired to by the Devil’s party ...”

“... only other woman on the boat besides the captain’s wife, is a very young English girl, Gabriel Shepherd (the name surely a sardonic nod toward both landed and unlanded ways of being far from the madding crowd). Gabriel has been signed on as cook, and she can scarcely separate the actual voyage from the recording of it, which she does daily and religiously ...”

“... and defender of Classicism, Maurice Denis. On his return from Italy he painted murals of the Good Shepherd and the Four Evangelists in a Swiss church. In the winter of 1927 he turned his attention to the streets and quais of Paris, perhaps inspired by the gritty canvases of Maurice Utrillo, who was then at the height of his reputation. Then, in 1932, after ...”

“... consistent, until ill-health restrained her, in going after it. Even Tomalin’s description of John Middleton Murry’s role in Mansfield’s life as ‘crucial and largely unfortunate’ seems to me glib. Is it right to ignore, as Tomalin does, that farewell letter in which Mansfield wrote: ‘I think no two lovers ever walked the earth more joyfully ...”

“... in a day thinks nothing of cutting my hair. He cuts it with scissors but his father who was a shepherd always cut their hair with shears.’ While barbering, the tactful Carter Mounty tells Russell (aged 66) that he looks only 45, but he adds: ‘Of course you’re an oldish man really. I expect you begin to feel old too ... God knows I do.’ All the ...”

“... 1860s, western Missouri and eastern Kansas produced Border Ruffians, Jayhawkers, guerrillas and John Brown. Pro-slavery men and Abolitionists, Confederates and Union men murdered their opponents. Unionists expelled many non-combatants in an attempt to deny guerrillas support. The Southern guerrillas rode under the black flag, slaughtering their ...”

“... was made’. Shakespeare usually employs the word to designate the quality of something. Corin the shepherd wisely says that ‘the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn.’ That Shakespeare could be fascinated by the subject-object mutualities of property is shown by his mysterious poem ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’: ‘Property was thus appalled,/That ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title sequences. Still, the organisers encourage us to compromise, to substitute human for theological concepts, to accept the life and sufferings of Christ as ‘archetypes of all human experience’, conveying truths not just to ...”

“... is the real enemy.’) But he loves Falstaff, not in the old vacant, adoring, incomparable Sir John way, but as a man with a life, and an antitype to the ghastly prince; not a character you would choose to run a country or a university, but a man of style; fat, but compare his way of talking and behaving with Hal’s and it is the prince who seems ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”