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“... R.W. Chambers, Robert Bolt and the Catholic church. By contrast the More of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for ...”

“... cultural change in his party. An intense-looking middle-aged man on the other side of the lecture hall became agitated as she spoke. ‘Stupid cow,’ he hissed. The man had asked the first question of the evening, about the Conservative position on European integration. Letwin had replied that he was happy to discuss it but hoped not to do so all night. In ...”

“... In the West, the analogous world of sound and silence can now be experienced only in the concert hall, and this perhaps partly explains the extreme attentiveness of audiences at concerts of classical music. At the Festival Hall, recently, three thousand people sat devoutly through a recital of the second book of Bach’s ...”

“... from a very different direction. The Royal Court articulated the anguish and exclusion of, in Kenneth Tynan’s words, ‘the non-U intelligentsia who live in bedsitters and divide the Sunday papers into two groups, “posh” and “wet”’; Stratford East celebrated the festive energy of the put-upon and the oppressed, for whom the Sunday papers meant ...”

“... Trust’s activities have served to invent a national past, not just conserve it. Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, he notices, now has a fancy knot garden ‘exactly reproducing what the Tudor Moretons may possibly have had, or if they didn’t, ought to have had’.And the men and women who inhabit this land of dead but re-imagined great houses do ...”

“... wanker with vengeful fantasies of fame, had he not been lodged at the most progressive student hall in Spain: the Residencia de Estudiantes. Built on Krausian ideals of liberal austerity, the Residencia also aspired to an Oxbridge collegiate atmosphere. It differed from Oxbridge by offering as much culture as sport, but there was compulsory ...”

“... of the current po-mo poster boys, Tao Lin, with his anaesthetised declarative sentences, and Kenneth Goldsmith with his ‘uncreative writing’, such as a transcription of a year’s worth of daily radio weather reports. Foucault notes: ‘Today’s writing has freed itself from the theme of expression.’ Even the title of the book unchains the ...”

“... flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the ...”

“... ways. This is particularly true of Joseph Chamberlain. Second City is full of Brummies, like Kenneth Tynan or the members of Duran Duran, who successfully pretended they were from somewhere else, but Chamberlain remains far more identified with Birmingham than his native Camberwell. He was its mayor for just three years, between 1873 and 1876, and spent ...”

“... and national media, but he was as dependent on graft and patronage as any old pol from Tammany Hall, for decades the home of the Democratic Party machine. Though he didn’t sup directly at the public trough, he had no scruples about ignoring or stretching the law to advance his agenda, creating no-show jobs for friends who could do him favours and no-bid ...”

“... a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience familiar with the King James ...”

“... a hyper-uranian aspect to become an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. As a mature poet, Duncan was accused by his friend Charles Olson – along with just about everyone else who read his work – of wanton myth-mongering, a charge ...”

“... rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis ...”

“... actually alone. He was accompanied, as always, by his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. His lover Eric Hall, who was funding him, visited from time to time, and Bacon sometimes went to London, where his studio still was. The idea that two years in isolation or the sense of hitting bottom can be used to explain a shift in an artist’s work is one way of filling a ...”

“... to the personal enthusiasm of successive Conservative ministers of education, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning ...”