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“... from other sources than grief in no way invalidates the findings of the experiment. Had I been Paul Ferris, I should certainly have waited until Burton had popped his Gucci clogs: not only would such patience have been rewarded by an exponential expansion of the little-old-lady market (not to say the dirty-old-lady market), it might also have resulted in ...”

“... be turned quickly. Little flecks broke off. I opened it at random to 1 Corinthians 10, a letter of Paul’s about idolatry. The letter spoke of people who wandered in the wilderness eating ‘pneumatic’ bread and drinking from a ‘pneumatic’ rock – or so I was translating it in my head, the word for ‘spiritual’ being pneumatikos in Greek, from ...”

“... taken from the vat of greenish dye turned blue on exposure to the air. In Indigo, Jenny Balfour-Paul glosses these processes scientifically. The first surprise is that indigo, the dye of dyes, is in some ways more like a pigment. It needs no mordant, even on non-absorbent fabrics like cotton. Tiny particles, not individual molecules, adhere to the ...”

“... from Function to Fetish (until 25 January), a show that begins by being about the mannequins, or lay figures, that artists often used as technical aids. More pliable, and more patient, than live models, many of them were also compelling and strange. A primitive lay figure once owned by Walter Sickert is stretched out on a ...”

“... General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave Russia, and they ...”

“... use of thick concepts to be unsettled by radical reflection upon them, means that ethics cannot lay claim to the objectivity of science. Arguments of this kind have received from a number of quarters the challenge that, after all, scientific objectivity is only scientific objectivity, that it is no news that ethics isn’t science, and that none of this ...”

“... transaction with the outside world, regularly intercepting letters. Paranoia was the family ethos. Paul’s sensibility did not earn high marks from his father. Its earliest manifestations were greeted with derision and he relied for emotional support almost entirely on his vivacious mother, Elisabeth. ‘A quiet and docile student, he worked hard; he had a ...”

“... a similar ambition: to strip away the vestiges of culture, personality and history, in order to lay bare the thing itself: the human body (especially the female one) retrieved from secrecy, now arrested and offered anonymously for our unhindered inspection. Nowadays, however, we want more than just a naked body. The body must be named and given an ...”

“... again, is to blame: ‘teachers are so keen to be politically correct that they are afraid to lay down what’s right or wrong in case they’re branded sexist or racist.’ The result of ‘trendy’, ‘Sixties’ teaching methods has been the destruction of ‘civilised behaviour and respect for other people and their property’ and the spawning of ...”

“... it is certainly the picture that dominates most attempts to write a general history of the Jews. Paul Johnson, already the author of a History of Christianity and a History of the English People, starts his third excursus into universal history with some self-interrogation. ‘Why have I written a history of the Jews?’ he asks, and offers four ...”

“... for Brooke a small foothold in Gay Studies’. The star turn was a letter first printed in full in Paul Delany’s The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (1987). Writing to James Strachey, Brooke describes some encounters with his fellow Rugbeian Denham Russell-Smith: We had hugged & kissed & strained, Denham & I, on & off for years ...”

“... This misfortune befell the Duke of Wellington in Hyde Park on a May day in 1829. Much of the blame lay with his Guards bearskin cap, nearly two feet high, which he was wearing instead of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers ...”

“... of truth and accuracy in autobiographical writing while I was reading Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Paul Theroux’s book about his 30-year friendship with V.S. Naipaul.2 I don’t think my reaction was unusual. Parts of the negative picture of Naipaul were convincing, but there are obvious inventions and contrivances, especially in the dialogue – in some ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”