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“... because ‘as a large conger eel is said to devour the small fry, so this united body overpowers young and single traders.’ But sometimes the single traders bit back, and Curll’s great skill was to operate as both predator and parasite, always for his own purposes, though often in short-term tactical alliances that spread the cost of new projects ...”

“... of a huge and unpleasant prejudice, and here it is: when a bright, healthy and highly educated young man jumps on the sleeper train and heads this way, with the declared intention of seeking ‘wild places’, my first reaction is to groan. It brings out in me a horrible mix of class, gender and ethnic tension. What’s that coming over the hill? A ...”

“... the evils of the caste system by taking ‘the lowest person he could find’ as his wife: a young woman from a ‘backward’ caste whose dark skin, ‘coarse tribal features’ and ‘terrible rough voice’ both repel and fascinate him. Meanwhile, he wages a low-level campaign of civil disobedience in the tax office where he works, destroying evidence ...”

“... sea itself seems to wear a different and diminished aspect from the sea of Lord Nelson’s day.’ Roger Knight’s life of Nelson is almost fifty times as long as Conrad’s centenary essay (excluding the appendices, which take up more than a hundred additional pages), but readers may nevertheless conclude that biography too is ‘different and ...”

“... virility. The artist as gentleman, the artist as courtier, the artist as thinker, the artist as a young man or woman, the artist as artist and handsome figure: these are some of the varieties of representation of the artist from the Reformation and Renaissance to, say, David Hockney. Van Dyck made numerous self-portraits. His friend Rubens’s picture of him ...”

“... were among the chief promoters of the Gallery, and they were much concerned to encourage young artists to measure their achievements against those of the Old Masters. Although their paternalism was often resented, creating paintings that would be regarded as modern equivalents to the work of Claude, Teniers, Poussin or Cuyp, was a fundamental ...”

“... Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being produced for this very market, just as a certain kind of film is? Are these other readers encountering ...”

“... Balzac’s​  Sarrasine tells the story of a young woman’s wonder at the strange appearance of an old man at a party in Paris. Balzac has tremendous fun describing the man. First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied ...”

“... stock of American humanity (the latest census reveals that ethnic minorities, particularly in young age groups, are growing explosively). The recent attack on universities was triggered by freshman requirements at an élite West Coast university. Allegations that the Western Culture course at Stanford was ‘racist’ began to surface in 1986. Like other ...”

“... Born in 1740, the heir of a cool, clever Lowland laird and lawyer, he became very rapidly a young literary lion, an acquaintance of Rousseau and Voltaire, the close friend, not just of Samuel Johnson, but of a broad sample of London’s cultural and fashionable élite, the celebrated biographer of the Corsican nationalist, Pasquale Paoli, a man, or so ...”

“... vives pochades (‘lively sketches’).Serious analysis of Fragonard’s output began with Roger Portalis’s two-volume monograph of 1889. Since then, the dominant view of him has been as the quintessential painter of eros – the Goncourts called him ‘a Cherubino of erotic painting’ after the Marriage of Figaro character who falls in love with ...”

“... had lived by writing – and after 1758 the words came just as abundantly. At a shrewd estimate, Roger Pearson calculates in his sprightly and thoroughly engaging biography, some fifteen million words flowed from Voltaire’s pen. The critical edition currently being published by Oxford’s Voltaire Foundation is scheduled to contain 85 volumes. As well as ...”

“... the Bourbon restoration as a newly ennobled marquis and grand old man of the establishment. Roger Hahn has been studying this career for half a century. He has located letters and papers thought to be lost, written on the tough problems of Laplace’s religious beliefs and his relation with Newtonian cosmology, and at last written a new biography, first ...”

“... away from their lives – to heroines with gumption, or plausibly handsome yet morally flawed young men. The suitcase holds the protagonists’ future. The man uses his free hand to get ready to light a cigarette, pulling a silver cigarette case from his pocket. The woman obviously doesn’t have a free hand. Her suitcase holds a few bits and pieces of ...”

“... else’s. In the Hitchcock film, the suit marks a turning-point: having been kidnapped, Grant (Roger Thornhill) is taken to a country house and interrogated by James Mason (Van Damme), who assumes Grant is one George Kaplan. After the bourbon and the car, Grant returns to the scene of the crime with the police, only to find all signs of his story ...”