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“... too big to do more than quiver a haunch at Lancaster’s jabs. Nor was the situation a new one: Ruskin was unhappy about railways, and the spread of industrial cities could make no aesthete happy. But Lancaster, and friends like John Betjeman and John Piper, were part of the movement ...”

“... looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than the photographs. Sickert’s brown fog and a Whistlerian mist creep into ...”

“... but he didn’t seem to mind so long as he got attention. The disastrous 1877 libel suit with Ruskin, who had ridiculed one of his paintings, bankrupted him – he won a farthing’s damages, but no costs – but it also brought him publicity across two continents as a fighter for modern art, an American who dared to take on the British establishment. A ...”

“... evangelists like Carlyle, agonised agnostics like Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like Ruskin and Morris, and vegetarian Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs accused capitalism of betraying what was best for all by bringing out the worst in each. In Victorian fiction its heroes are few, and overshadowed by its villains. Disraeli’s novels glorified ...”

“... what may, in socio-historical terms, be the first post-Jumbo Jet novel. Just as Wordsworth and Ruskin in the last century predicted and fulminated against the social implications of the new railways’ capacity for moving hordes of people into somewhere like the Lake District, so a newer mass translation of the populace is behind Paradise News: nowadays ...”

“... Boon’ was right up my street. Raphael was there, sitting on the floor in the packed main hall of Ruskin College where he taught adult students, amid dozens of historians from both inside and outside the university. He looked like the eternal student himself in jeans and bomber jacket, long hair flopping over his eyes as he smoked a roll-up. ‘A bit of an ...”

“... Writing history was therefore a sacramental act, a means to rediscovering God. Carlyle, Ruskin said, had been ‘born in the clouds and struck by lightning’. To Froude, he was ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, Scotland’s new John Knox, ‘whose voice was like the sounding of ten thousand trumpets’. In ...”

“... published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by eminent Anglophone or Continental writers but without much discussion of the nature of autobiographical form. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and ...”

“... Pietro Germi, Anatole Litvak, Jean Painlevé, Gillo Pontecorvo, Nicholas Roeg, George Rouquier, John Schlesinger, Henri Storck, John Sturges and Arne Sucksdorff. And what are we to make of those who are mentioned in the text, but not favoured with individual entries? Pioneers like the Lumière brothers; veterans like ...”

“... of his life, after twenty years of writing, and then to read a reactionary sermon from his book on Ruskin. It is not simply that a whole generation of diverse cultural discussion has hardly surfaced on the BBC: those now in charge are toadies who have been willing to operate such bans without public protest, and who have been required to construct a discourse ...”

“... as a founder and moving spirit of History Workshop, originally a sort of democratic teach-in at Ruskin College, to which workers and students came with their sleeping-bags, later institutionalised as History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians; nowadays it bears the respectable imprint of the Oxford University Press and has just dropped ...”

“... was always controversial. Dickens was only the first of many critics. Carlyle, Disraeli, Kingsley, Ruskin, Morris, Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Churchill, Beveridge – all arraigned it as morally indefensible. It punished not only the ‘undeserving’ poor (the ‘residuum’ or ‘underclass’ of incorrigibles) but the ‘deserving’ poor too – those ...”

“... of others in Jamaica: it may seem surprising that such men as Dickens, Tennyson, Kingsley and Ruskin took the opposite view – Carlyle indeed called Harrison’s party ‘nigger-philanthropists’. He wanted Home Rule for Ireland, and later stood as a Parliamentary candidate on Gladstone’s side. He saw that the suspension of habeas corpus was not the ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful ...”