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“... An early one, the National Gallery Baptism of Christ, is dominated by just such naked figures – John and Christ. They are not shown, however, in a corner of classical Tuscany but set against a scene of North European forest and mountains – a landscape like a stage backdrop. The backdrop shares none of the light which descends through a ring of dancing ...”

“... the London pictures, paintings from 1618 through to the late 1620s, include religious subjects (St John on Patmos, The Immaculate Conception) and genre pieces (The Water-Seller of Seville, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary). The genre pictures are lit, it seems, by an afternoon sunlight which penetrates dark rooms, strikes highlights ...”

“... About Modern Art, Sylvester tells how Britain in the 1950s had, as he saw it, to be saved from John Berger (both men had stints as art critic for the New Statesman) whose ‘rhetorical skills and . . . performing skills on TV won considerable support, financial as well as moral, for inferior artists.’Berger had a Ruskinian interest in the social context ...”

“... is that there is still an intense desire to make art out of the urban condition. The politics of John Heartfield’s collages and the work of the Russians in the 1920s have not lost their verve and bite. But commercial imagery – still, moving, computer-made, photographed, even hand-drawn – has occupied so much of the visual universe that finding a margin ...”

“... own creature. When he eventually wrote Pygmalion, he designed the role of Eliza for Mrs Patrick Campbell. He went to persuade her to take it and, as he reported to Ellen Terry, ‘fell head over ears in love with her in thirty seconds’. Shaw was at the time 55 and Mrs Pat, who, on taking Shaw’s hand, performed what he called the ‘infamous, abandoned ...”

“... violence that Brown wished on his enemies. The underling was working towards the Führer. Alastair Campbell, speaking on Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics, thinks the proper analogy is with football. McBride was a rogue player so set on mindless aggression that he fouled people all over the pitch. He was like a footballer who was happy to kick his own ...”

“... John Berger is 60. He is not forgotten. Permanent Red, his criticism from the Fifties, is in print. Ways of Seeing is the antidote put in the hands of students who have drunk too deeply of Courtauld art history. His novels, too, have created a stir. His first, A Painter of Our Time, had such vitriolic reviews that the publishers withdrew it, and G won the Booker Prize: Berger’s hard swallow on that sugarplum made him briefly notorious ...”

“... practical of men, it seems. His wife, Esther, the tough one, had two goals, the art historian John Rewald wrote: ‘to make friends happy while at the same time running his life by any means she could think of’. Together she and Lucien produced the 30-plus books printed by the Eragny Press, the subject of the current exhibition at the Ashmolean (until ...”

“... of the Sedley and Osborne families there, and later made it the scene of the sale that followed John Sedley’s bankruptcy, the sale at which Becky Sharp was outbid by Captain Dobbin for Amelia’s little square piano. (Building began in 1800, so Becky Sharp saw the square when it was quite new.) It would be, at best, a cosmetic exercise. There are too many ...”

“... what you see in pictures such as The Magic Apple Tree and In a Shoreham Garden – works, Rachel Campbell-Johnston says in her new biography, ‘of mad splendour’. ‘In a Shoreham Garden’ (c.1830). Palmer has generally been well served by his modern biographers. The landmark in the field is Geoffrey Grigson’s Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years ...”

“... 1611 spelling, ornamental capitals beginning each chapter, a detailed map of Palestine engraved by John Speed (whose maps of English counties were selling so well at the time), a calendar of Church of England holy days and lessons for church services, and, strangest of all, 34 meticulously referenced genealogical tables of biblical characters culminating in ...”

“... to follow her. Especially successful is her account of the way Ian Wilmut and his co-worker Keith Campbell managed to trick nuclei from differentiated cells into behaving like their embryonic counterparts. The biochemical constitution of a cell varies throughout the cycle, and there is a phase in which the cell rests. ...”

“... an expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside ...”

“... something stranger and more disturbing than anything painters commonly manage comes through. Sir John Herschel’s stubbly chin and wild white hair as they emerge from draped velvet in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph do not conform to the painterly canon of images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter ...”

“... be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James Campbell McInnes, a man of working-class origins who became the foremost British lieder-singer of his generation. Unfortunately for this marriage of the muses and the classes, Campbell McInnes was also drunken, violent, and ...”