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“... transformation coincided with a dramatic change in her relationship with her sister, whose son Julian was killed in Spain in July 1937. His death was an overwhelming tragedy for Vanessa. Virginia was suddenly called upon to support her and protect her in the most terrible of circumstances. She reacted to her sister’s need with immense love and patience ...”

“... for their involvement in the Spanish Civil War’ (the other two writers are John Cornford and Julian Bell, the subjects of Journey to the Frontier). This is ingenious, but not convincing: the book reads like what it obviously is, a piece of an abandoned project, a part of an unwritable life. Once more, there is no indication of any help from Sonia ...”

“... the unexpected visitors are not homicidal cult members: they are Dan’s university dropout son, Julian, and his teenage girlfriend, Sasha, passing through on a road trip north, unaware that the house is occupied. ‘He didn’t remember me, and why should he?’ Evie says of Julian. ‘I was a woman outside his range of ...”

“... press, pamphlets and manifestos, exchanges and arguments with friends and family (especially with Julian Bell, her nephew, who was determined to join the Republicans in Spain; his death there in 1937 made the book seem more necessary). The drafting, when it began in 1936, raced and galloped violently. It was an explosive experience: ‘It has pressed ...”

“... of the older Carritt boys went to Spain, one of them wounded and the other killed, like Julian Bell, at Brunete.†) At Winchester Frank was already interested in Marxism. He wasn’t alone. First there was his friend John Hasted, whom he seems to have inducted into ‘libertarian Bolshevism’ and who, like him, went on to New College. (Hasted ...”

“... its visual artists. They are understood only too well, and patronised with faint praise. Clive Bell’s ‘Significant Form’ is an aesthetic curiosity, Roger Fry’s influence as a theorist long ago terminated. The pictures and decorative work of the Bloomsbury English Modernists – Bell, Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora ...”

“... network and ‘reach out and touch someone’ in ways entirely unforeseen by Alexander Graham Bell. Speculating about the impact of such artificial erotic experience, Rheingold turned to an already up and-running technology – to ‘telephone sex’, the adult party lines where you pay to make conversation with a member of the preferred gender. While the ...”

“... Lawrence, but also from history itself – from Spain most immediately. ‘Today the struggle.’ Julian Bell, whom Richards knew, died there, but not before he had diagnosed the disturbed visions of civilised discontent he found in Freud and Richards as ‘mild troubles’. Poetry seemed unlikely to save us after all. But even before Spain made a cruder ...”

“... Where​ do the noses go?’ Ingrid Bergman asks in For Whom the Bell Tolls, voicing apprehension over how to kiss. ‘Always I wonder where the noses will go.’ For an artist the equivalent might be ‘Where do the thumbs go?’ Hands are notoriously difficult to draw: all those fingers so close together, limblets so expressive when we use them in life, yet often numb and dumb when pictured ...”

“... of the head. Jean-Dominique Bauby’s recent account of his own brainstem disaster, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly,* ‘dictated’ by blinking his one active eyelid, gives an overwhelming idea of the shape of the locked-in universe: a place with the atmosphere more of a moon-walk than of a deep-sea dive, where life’s possibilities have been left ...”

“... of the MP and journalist Horatio Bottomley, a fraudster whose victims, according to his biographer Julian Symons, often felt he ‘did not mean to do wrong’; a man fond of ‘the good life … of mistresses, champagne, gambling and entertaining’. He was best known for his magazine John Bull. Launched in 1906 following Bottomley’s election as the Liberal ...”

“... unfavourably to Machiavelli, Herod, Absalom, Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus, Decius, Nebuchadnezzar, Julian the Apostate and Nero. In the summer of 1589, a Dominican monk named Jacques Clément entered the King’s camp outside Paris, claiming to have secret information: ushered into Henri III’s presence, he took a knife from his sleeve and stabbed the King to ...”

“... spots it more quickly than we do, that he calls in the style-police as soon as the typewriter bell rings for the end of the line, and that this makes it all right. Hamilton’s robust unimpressibility has always been one of his strengths as a critic: here there are too many occasions when he yields not just to ‘easy superiority of tone’ but to a ...”

“... the other, and old husbands and wives clasp hands and raise arms together, and two boys, like Julian Bell and John Cornford, who’ve been lying out on the lawn get to their feet and sing – and moreover know the words. 30 July. In the week that Paul Foot is buried the Court of Appeal orders that the Hickeys, acquitted after being wrongly imprisoned ...”

“... or that the largest picture on view would be a frothy, larky double portrait by Vanessa Bell of Mr and Mrs Maynard Keynes. The show is densely hung, with ten sections crammed into three rooms; but this rather serves as a confirmation of the hurlyburlyness of art’s history, and of how the continuing clamour of the past acts as a help, not a ...”