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Picture in Little

Charles Nicholl: Hilliard’s Trajectory, 19 December 2019

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 337 pp., £40, February 2019, 978 0 300 24142 6
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... however. His family were staunchly Protestant, and during the turbulent Catholic ascendancy under Mary Tudor they sent him to the Continent. At the age of about ten he arrived in Calvinist Geneva, where he spent two years in the household of John Bodley, an Exeter merchant. From this experience he gained a good knowledge of French, an early familiarity with ...

Baudelairean

Mary Hawthorne: The Luck of Walker Evans, 5 February 2004

Walker Evans 
by James Mellow.
Perseus, 654 pp., £15.99, February 2002, 1 903985 13 7
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... had. Afterwards, fearful that he would frighten people with his gaunt face, he grew a Whitmanesque beard and referred to himself as a ‘lean Santa Claus’. He crammed his house in Connecticut with old advertising signs of the sort he had photographed in his youth and with bottle caps and debris. He bought a Polaroid camera, and when the company learned of ...

The general tone is purple

Alison Light: Where the Poor Lived, 2 July 2020

Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps 
edited by Mary S. Morgan.
Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., £49.95, October 2019, 978 0 500 02229 0
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... own animadversions and even novelistic touches. The Reverend the Honourable R. Henley, vicar of St Mary’s, Putney, was ‘an old man – well over sixty – moustache and beard slightly stained from pipe smoking’. Seeing grubby boys playing cricket in the streets of Deptford using their caps and coats as wickets, one ...

Do you want the allegory?

Charles Hope, 17 March 1983

Piero della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’ 
by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.
Yale, 182 pp., £19.50, January 1982, 0 300 02619 6
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Indagini su Piero 
by Carlo Ginzburg.
Einaudi, 110 pp.
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Gentile da Fabriano 
by Keith Christiansen.
Chatto, 193 pp., £35, June 1982, 0 7011 2468 7
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... almost touching the roof of a lofty church, he was obviously drawing the familiar parallel between Mary and the Church itself. Again, when the room of the Virgin Annunciate was decorated with statues of Moses and Isaiah, these figures were included for a specific reason: Moses was a famous type or prefiguration of Christ, while Isaiah prophesied: ‘Behold, a ...

Diary

Danny Karlin: A Night at Greenham, 2 August 1984

... The phone rings at 10.15. It’s Mary, from Campaign Atom: the Cruise convoy’s been sighted, fifteen miles from Greenham. It’s on its way back. Everyone on the network who wants to go down, go now. My heart sinks. So does Pat’s, when I tell her. We both have exam papers to mark, and meetings the next day; and the memory of a fruitless watch for the convoy three nights ago, at a roundabout on the Oxford ring-road, sours the prospect ...

His Whiskers Trimmed

Matthew Karp: Robert E. Lee in Defeat, 7 April 2022

Robert E. Lee: A Life 
by Allen Guelzo.
Knopf, 585 pp., $27.99, September 2021, 978 1 101 94622 0
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... Confederate states. It wasn’t until the late 1850s that he became a planter: through his wife, Mary Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, Lee inherited several hundred enslaved people scattered across a number of Custis family estates in Virginia. He decided to improve production by transferring and hiring out slaves, regardless of family ...

Name the days

Marina Warner: Holy Spirits, 4 February 2021

Angels & Saints 
by Eliot Weinberger.
Norton, 159 pp., £21.99, September 2020, 978 0 8112 2986 9
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... family safely out of Sodom before destroying the city; in the New Testament, Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she will become the mother of God and another, unnamed angel forewarns Joseph about the Massacre of the Innocents.Many angels are also famous saints. The town of Saint-Raphaël lies close to Saint-Tropez, but the two resorts’ patrons belong to ...

Better and Worse Worsts

Sadakat Kadri: American Trials, 24 May 2007

The Trial in American Life 
by Robert Ferguson.
Chicago, 400 pp., £18.50, March 2007, 978 0 226 24325 2
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... States, and an engraving of his face – framed between his bushy hair and a bird’s nest of a beard – gazed reproachfully from newspapers throughout the north. Before the raid on Harpers Ferry, he had seemed no more than a crackpot or a zealot to the few people who knew him. But as millions of Americans learned of the man who was ready to die for the ...

Sounds like hell to me

Michael Wood, 13 November 1997

Duchamp: A Biography 
by Calvin Tomkins.
Chatto, 350 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 7011 6642 8
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The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp 
by Arturo Schwartz.
Thames and Hudson, 292 pp., £145, September 1997, 0 500 09250 8
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... This one also has L.H.O.O.Q. written on it, and is signed by Duchamp, but has no moustache or beard, just is a reproduction of the painting. Duchamp has added the word rasée, ‘shaven’, as if to make the original into the later work, and to make us see the now invisible hair not only on the copy but on Da Vinci’s original. The amazing Duchamp ...

Bonking with Berenson

Nicholas Penny, 17 September 1987

Bernard Berenson. Vol. II: The Making of a Legend 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 680 pp., £19.95, May 1987, 0 674 06779 7
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The Partnership: The Secret Association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen 
by Colin Simpson.
Bodley Head, 323 pp., £15, April 1987, 9780370305851
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... of the behaviour of this opinionated, charming, witty connoisseur with his immaculate silken beard? If so, Samuels seems not to know about it. The sharpest observations on Berenson in this book came from Mrs Berenson – above all from a letter in which she warned Roger Fry about the difficulties of resuming good relations with her husband. It begins by ...

The Call of the Weird

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Last Gasp Apparitions, 4 April 2024

Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect 
by John Sloan.
Oxford, 285 pp., £78, June 2023, 978 0 19 286687 5
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Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum 
by Owen Davies.
Oxford, 350 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 19 887300 6
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... long. Nothing needs to be explained in a world where anything can be real. Bluebeard’s blue beard, which causes his future wife to loathe him, is simply that, not a symbol to be decoded. The illustrations, which embed meditative damsels in the haunted thickets of Burne-Jones and the sinister bestiaries of Wagner’s Ring, deepen the oneiric mood.One of ...

Hang Santa

Wendy Doniger, 16 December 1993

Unwrapping Christmas 
edited by Daniel Miller.
Oxford, 239 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 19 827903 5
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... in the presence of several hundred Sunday School children, publicly burnt (they set fire to his beard) in the precinct. The clergy had condemned him as a usurper and heretic who had ‘paganised’ the Christmas festival, installing himself at its centre ‘like a cuckoo in the nest’. Lévi-Strauss (to whom paradoxes are what whales were to Captain ...

Snouty

John Bayley, 4 June 1987

The Faber Book of Diaries 
edited by Simon Brett.
Faber, 498 pp., £12.95, March 1987, 0 571 13806 3
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A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries 
by Linda Pollock.
Fourth Estate, 319 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 947795 25 1
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... or fresh-cut willow hurdle set all over with paradise fruits cut through – first through a beard of golden fibre and then through wet flesh greener than greengages or purpler than grapes – or say that the knife had caught a tatter or flag of the skin and laid it flat across the flesh – and then within all a sluggish corner drop of black or purple ...

Who invented Vercingétorix?

Julian Jackson: French national identity, 27 June 2002

Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire. Volume I: The State 
by Pierre Nora, translated by Mary Trouille.
Chicago, 475 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 226 59132 8
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... were learning their lessons in Africa or the West Indies); that Charlemagne had a flowing white beard and cared about education (but he may have been most popular because his coronation date, 800, was so easy to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many ...

Who has the gall?

Frank Kermode: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 8 March 2007

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Penguin, 94 pp., £8.99, August 2006, 0 14 042453 9
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 114 pp., £12.99, January 2007, 978 0 571 22327 5
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... until Christmas Eve. Then At that time of tiding, He prayed to highest heaven. Let Mother Mary guide him Towards some house or haven. The effect of the bob-and-wheel is striking; it wraps up the stanza or section it is concluding with a decorative comment or summary that stresses its own difference from the routine of the alliterative verse to which ...

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