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“... the statements of the three friends she denounced as terrorists, Joseph Mooney, Brendan Magill and Alexander Rowntree. In long interviews, all three men had convinced the police that they had no connection at all with any terrorist organisation or any bombing. Yet at the trial their Irish names were left dangling in the air. To the jury they were ...”

“... to the emotions horrified its critics then and since, from Dickens to E.P. Thompson. The undoubted star here was George Whitefield rather than John Wesley. Whitefield never finished one of his open-air sermons without dissolving into tears, and he was always gratified to see thousands of his audience in tears too, for example at the collieries outside ...”

“... the citizen without qualities’. Both Barth and his Jewish contemporary Franz Rosenzweig, whose Star of Redemption outlined a politically passive notion for Jews of religious fulfilment through the performance of Jewish rituals, ended up in the same place: ‘Man’s ultimate destiny is not to be found in politics, only in divine redemption.’ This is ...”

“... which counted St Luke as a patron saint and appealed to cultivated princes. After all, hadn’t Alexander the Great visited the studio of Apelles?Armed with such classical precedents, painters increasingly behaved as a class apart, marked out by their intellectual aspirations, communion with nude bodies and strange habits of working at night. A gothic print ...”

“... Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III rebuilt the abbey in 1245 as a shrine to St Edward – and a royal mausoleum to himself, almost bankrupting the Crown in the process. The abbey’s own website calls him ‘recklessly ...”

“... by President Macron’s pledge to make the rebuilding a national project; he appointed a five-star general, Jean-Louis Georgelin, to oversee the work. While this, naturally, ruffled feathers in the Ministry of Culture, and the programme has had its difficulties and its critics, the vast project, which on any given day involves about a thousand people ...”

“... trawl through the hits of Eurodisco, however, at least acknowledges Cerrone, a French disco star who released some of the era’s best records in some of the era’s worst record sleeves. The book doesn’t have much to say about DJs: Larry Levan is described as ‘one of the most influential DJs of the disco era’, but rates just one paragraph. In a ...”

“... a New York gallery of Sots Art, an ironic appropriation of ‘socialist’ art by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, into trying to understand the deeper significance of Socialist Realism. This fascinating book swoops and lurches from topic to topic, but the reader’s feeling of disorientation is more than compensated for by the exhilaration of the ...”

“... In​ 1975 Angela Carter published a withering review of a star-studded production of Die Walküre, staged in the Roman amphitheatre at Orange. The classical setting was not Norse-friendly; the acoustics were horrible; the evening temperatures plummeted; and the wind wreaked havoc on the singers’ voices (Carter thought it was ‘probably blowing directly from Israel ...”

“... response was even more enthusiastic. Not yet 27, the kid from Vitebsk was a burgeoning European star. He returned home even so, arriving a week before the archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. It was in every way a tumultuous period. His mother died, he married Bella. His friends were drafted, but thanks to his well-connected in-laws Chagall got a clerical ...”

“... her fans were Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Cocteau and Le Corbusier (he imagined making her the star of a musical production in which she would evolve from monkey to modern woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire caricature of her (it seems ...”

“... cerebral’ director, and amuse showbiz New York mightily with the statement that, after their star-crossed Romeo and Juliet on Broadway in 1940, Olivier and Vivien Leigh went to lick their wounds for a month in Vermont with ‘the Alexander Woollcotts’. The English period equivalent would be a month in the country ...”

“... the world today – globalisation – it is a shame that he spoils his case by wrapping it in the Star-Spangled Banner. His voice is born of a century or more of American exceptionalism, of the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of ...”

“... seem, in view of its much more spectacular neighbours like Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander or Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, to be a dull choice. Indeed this rather intimate picture is an exception for Bassano himself, who produced much more spectacular paintings, one of which, a tumultuous Nativity in the National Gallery of Scotland, at ...”

“... Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for it was Theobald’s remarkable claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work by Shakespeare. ‘It is my good fortune to retrieve this remnant of his pen from obscurity,’ he says with studied ...”