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“... Lord Quinton, when told that I was proposing to sign in, described it as ‘pure Gilbert and Sullivan’. Lord Annan told me that his wife calls it ‘Noel’s play-group’. Lord Adrian told me that I would find it like a prep school. And I remembered that years ago the late Lord Gage, whom Lord Briggs regards as a notably regrettable ...”

“... a wide public there is at least a hint of the attitude of 20th-century sculptors like Christo, or Gilbert and George, who have made the performance the art, and the record (very often in photographs) of ephemeral events-the residue of creativity by earlier definitions – the stuff of it. While the abounding physical presence of Rodin’s work seems to deny ...”

“... off her stays by the water’s edge and never wore them again’, and was remembered in flowing white robes by a girl from Glasgow: ‘the first grown-up I had ever seen wearing bare feet and sandals.’ The marriage was, eventually, consummated, and the first of four daughters was born in 1911. The family and her own work began to take up more and more of ...”

“... treading on my tail’), Humpty Dumpty’s little fishes who would not listen to advice and the White Knight’s old man who hunts for haddocks’ eyes among the heather bright, and sets limed twigs for crabs. Can the English genius for nonsense really be explained simply by the fact that this is an island, set in what was until quite recently a ...”

“... beach reading – a steamy thriller with unobtrusive source notes. So: Before Mattie died Cousin Gilbert had let her know that he was reading her books on Emily. As his thin lips stretched to a self-satisfied smile, the long slits of his eyes narrowed. The effect was not altogether pleasant; his smile held an element of menace. And, right there, precisely ...”

“... Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh ...”

“... and his ‘tremendous attention’, before other favoured candidates, Hugh Walpole and Gilbert Cannan, and well before D.H. Lawrence, who was left to ‘hang in the dusty rear’. James was by now an old man, not in good health, and Mackenzie’s wife Faith began to have hopes that he might be going to leave them his money. But Mackenzie had no ...”

“... binoculars and polished bald heads. We don’t pay attention to the monster inflatables dressed in Gilbert and George outfits, attended by a squabble of kids and cameras. Art. It’s only art. A man in a tight suit is trying to force air into two face-painted condom figures. He is tethering them, reluctant windsocks, against the stiff breeze. And this again is ...”

“... Songs for Political Action – the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie, the cabaret bluesman Josh White and the self-invented folk bard Pete Seeger. The Oklahoma-born Guthrie, the most enduring of the three, was the culmination of those country protest singers – the Jim Garlands and Aunt Molly Jacksons – recruited into the Popular Front during the union ...”

“... makes the point about the crucial role of topography, institution, description, naming: one empty white room after another, each of them different, and each of them revealing. A space cooled by an air-conditioner that is recycling water from the morgue where the corpses of victims of Mexico’s drug war are washed (Air, 2003, by Teresa Margolles) gives a very ...”

“... whether we really need to know this much about Betjeman. Hillier acknowledges what, if Martin Gilbert had been a shade less thorough, might be a record number of helpers and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it his ...”

“... cinema – is himself a historical monument ‘condensing into a single figure the structures of white supremacist racial integration that built the United States: black labour in the realm of production, inter-racial nurture and sex (the latter as both a private practice and unifying public prohibition) in the realm of reproduction, and blackface minstrelsy ...”

“... channelled a widespread perception of nature in chaos to write Frankenstein. In his new book, Sam White adds the mishaps and muddles of American colonisation to the rap sheet. Most early colonial ventures, he argues, failed because they were bedevilled by false assumptions, the chief one being that climate was similar along a particular global latitude. In ...”

“... by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene. How we dress now ...”

“... Smith to walking on his eyeballs. It not only created fiery anguish in the big toe but caused a white precipitation at the knuckles. Horace Walpole wrote of ‘chalky rills running from the fingers’ and ‘a hail of chalkstones and liquid chalk’, as if from a burst pipe. The authors have spotted in a Sherlock Holmes story an old man ‘cram full of ...”