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“... of the Commonwealthmen and religious dissenters so influential in Britain and the colonies (James Price is mentioned once; James Burgh and Joseph Priestley not at all). He gives no attention to sermons, thus missing the religious zeal that J.C.D. Clark’s The Language of Liberty ...”

“... game called Masterpiece, and it was small, blurred and usually incomprehensible, even when Kenneth Clark was standing in front of it sounding enthusiastic on television. Why was a naked man wrapped in a curtain jumping over a wagon from behind a tree, twisting his head oddly as he did so to look towards a girl who seemed to be pushing an imaginary door in an ...”

“... the moment at which Continental demonology was brought to Scotland: it was in 1590, when James VI returned from Denmark with his bride. It is possible, since an arranged marriage is likely to be more traumatic for a homosexual than it is for most of us, that this moment also pinpoints a major attack of sexual guilt in ...”

“... partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before he took over the Dial, he wrote James Joyce a cheque for $700; it came to Joyce from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New ...”

“... raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to go to Los Angeles (and San Francisco), into the heart of noir mythology, to make a movie that alarmed Hollywood. Boorman was 33, and probably as soft-spoken and gentle as he is now, even if he knew he had to act tough and decisive. That’s how he conquered Lee ...”

“... attack of delirium in 1878, he reports: ‘It was utterly wonderful for me to find that I could go so heartily & headily mad; for you know I had been priding myself on my peculiar sanity! And it was more wonderful yet to find the madness made up into things so dreadful, out of things so trivial. One of the most provoking and disagreeable of the spectres was ...”

“... fixed. As for Longford’s qualms about self-centredness – well, his diary really is a diary. We go with him everywhere, from prison-visits to the Moors murderers (neither of whom seems properly grateful to him for his pains – he hints this once or twice and then lashes the vile hubris which should make him think such things) to all manner of ‘good ...”

“... element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]There is a great deal of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these ...”

“... form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... room.’ It’s one of the great historical putdowns: the patrician Whig punchline to Kenneth Clark’s scrutiny of Counter-Reformation art and architecture in his incomparable TV series Civilisation, before he turns from the camera and walks away down the considerable length of the Map Room in the Vatican, an Englishman abroad. His stroll is accompanied ...”

“... an actual absence in sensibility. In his splendidly passionate study, A Celebration of Death, James Stevens Curl blamed it all on Modernist design. It was, he implied, the fault of the architects that modern life, spent in the tower block and the motorway service station, ends with the crematorium and the black slab that are their aesthetic ...”

“... sunlight on the upper part of the house. You know, there are many thoughts, many impulses, that go into a picture . . . I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than in any symbolism.’ But Wagstaff has isolated this remark from its context: Hopper was discussing his painting Second Storey Sunlight of 1960, which he told ...”

“... to the need evidently felt by its audience for authoritative/enthusiastic communicators (Kenneth Clark, Robert Hughes, Wendy Beckett) which no other artistic public feels – though these things are doubtless relevant. I mean the priority given to a mode of address: when the critic performs, not by talking to us about work to which we’re both assumed to ...”

“... Party Conference, Ernest Bevin came raging up to those, including Ian Mikardo and oddly enough James Callaghan, who had called for public ownership to be in the Manifesto and yelled: ‘Congratulations! You have just lost us the election.’) Harold Wilson actually beat the Tories four times at the polls, which on the consensus calculus makes him the most ...”