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“... bring off this ambiguity still seems marvellous, befitting a painting that puns on the confusions born from illumination of all kinds. Their impact is enough to splinter the painting’s already fragile structure. There was no going back. To look again at the set of ‘studio’ studies is to grasp how the impasse was reached. The problem derived partly from ...”

“... British spy who could charm almost anyone and talk his way out of (or into) almost anything, was born sometime in the early 1870s, probably in southern Ukraine (either Odesa or Kherson), probably with the name Sigmund Rosenblum. Benny Morris – whose excellent short biography of Reilly is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series – is careful not to claim as ...”

“... been carrying round a photo of his quarry for a long time, and had no trouble recognising him: a born-again Christian in an American Refugee Committee T-shirt, his expression, in the one print here, somewhat closer to anxiety than regret. He’s now awaiting trial in Cambodia for crimes against humanity.One of the virtues of this exhibition is that Pilger ...”

“... of the warm family feeling which pervades this chronicle of politics and parturition (babies are born to the author on pages 143, 149, 179, 204, 211, 217, 239 and 252). The Pebbled Shore will disappoint those who hope to learn of tensions caused by Lord Longford’s self-imposed missions to Myra Hindley and ‘Reg and Ron’ (as the Krays are referred to in ...”

“... popular biography of Thackeray we have had in the last nine years, taking its place alongside Anne Monsarrat’s Thackeray: Uneasy Victorian (1980) and Margaret Forster’s sprightly ‘autobiography’, Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (1978). (Rather meanly, Peters leaves both competitors out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three ...”

“... Bacchae, Othello and Racine’s Iphigénie all illustrate our common predicament, that of being born of two parents, one of whom was the child’s object of desire, and the other the obstacle to its fulfilment. Green is prepared for readers to resist his oedipal readings. Indeed, his attitude is very much that of the experienced analyst poised to catch his ...”

“... to the James papers for the four decades it took him to complete his five-volume biography, was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Saskatchewan; he studied literature at McGill and then journalism at the Sorbonne. Once in Paris he became, in his own account, ‘a junior hanger-on of the expatriates in Montparnasse’ and decided to write a doctoral thesis on ...”

“... the staffroom, she took refuge in her classroom at lunchtime.Children, she writes, ‘are not born with race and colour prejudice. They absorb it from the adults around them.’ Gilroy countered the bigotry, or at times the simple stupidity, of colleagues, parents and the children who parroted what they heard, with a storyteller’s verve. When asked by ...”

“... good novel Foreign Parts, and uses a quite different kind of prose here from her earlier work. Anne Enright moves out and away from Dublin, though Eliza Lynch’s Irishness, and her childhood in the ‘bitter town’ of Mallow, do call her home. Both take on the fiction writer’s tussle with history and biography, shaping these real lives to their own ...”

“... Not even the scholarly Workman could escape the myth. For this unabashed admirer, Wyclif was a man born ahead of his time, ‘harbinger of a premature spring’. Did McFarlane escape? His title might suggest not: John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Non-conformity. But note that hyphen: Non-conformity rather than Nonconformity preserves Wyclif, and ...”

“... and a cousin of the woman who would be his first wife. Wishart, who became a painter, would marry Anne Dunn, who was also a lover of Freud’s. In Paris he worked on drawings and paintings. ‘I set certain rules for myself and I suppose those rules were exclusive. Never putting paint on top of paint. Never touching anything twice; and I didn’t want things ...”

“... was a great heiress, grand-daughter of the Earl of Warwick who was known as ‘the Kingmaker’. Born in 1473 into a world of bloody dynastic feuds, she survived under the first Tudor and thrived under the second, until she and her family, long suspected of plots against the regime, were destroyed. The French ambassador said she was ‘above eighty years ...”

“... The idea floated by Angeline Goreau, that Behn may have been the illegitimate child of a high-born woman, certainly accords with the few puzzling facts at least as well as anything else. Behn, everyone now agrees, really did visit Surinam. In England, at some point, she married (or may have married) a Dutch merchant, possibly older than her, a Mr Behn who ...”

“... propos. Edith Wharton, other reviewers have pointed out, had plenty of gifts from chance. She was born, in 1862, into wealth and leisure, she had a sufficiency of good looks (in an era when that mattered even more than now). As a writer she was highly successful, both critically and commercially. Benstock takes her title from a snatch of Matthew Arnold’s ...”

“... aesthetic daring; if it is conceived as an expression of a totalitarian ideal, it will be still-born. In 1940, when France fell, the Paris couture houses that remained open went on serving the Nazi elite, along with plenty of rich French collaborators. In Germany, women had gone into war work, while propaganda urged them to serve the Fatherland by having ...”