Search Results

“... rejection of Europe, there was consternation: Britain’s relations with the EU were on the line. Peter Mandelson, horrified at the implications – he styled himself Minister for Looking Ahead – was sure that this all resulted from leaving him out of the loop. Blair was alerted and asked Whelan what had happened. Whelan told him that the report merely ...”

“... The colour and lively handling were part of the legacy of 17th-century Flanders to 18th-century France. The broader gestures and stormy chiaroscuro which her English contemporaries favoured, and which came to them by various routes from Caravaggio, would not have suited her. The painter John Opie is reported to have found Vigée Le Brun’s pictures good in ...”

“... by apparently deliberate further increases in unemployment and massive de-industrialisation. In France, central indicative planning, which had seemed almost miraculously successful with the enormous economic growth of the Fifties and Sixties, was discredited when it proved unable to withstand the buffetings of inflation. A little belatedly, the Soviet Union ...”

“... Diaghilev ballet’. The influence of the Ballets Russes went much deeper than décor, however. As Peter Jacobs writes, it supplied a model of ‘a pagan liberty and a savage beauty, combined with a stylised severity or formal purity’, a liberty and a beauty embodied, one might add, in Nijinsky’s legs, to gaze on which Keynes briefly abandoned his Treatise ...”

“... simmering, which gells now one way, now another. Certainly graphic revolutions do occur, as in France in the eighth century and Byzantium in the ninth: in each case a new calligraphic script (for copying books) was deliberately created from the old cursive script (for writing documents), to serve the needs of a cultural revival. But Latin documentary ...”

“... activities at Stonehenge. Graham Robb’s archaeo-psycho-geographical-antiquarian bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by ...”

“... Pier, Brighton, that gesture towards locality. But Brighton looks more like Boulogne. The spell of France, transmitted through Bloomsbury by Clark and the criticism of Roger Fry, was compounded by Pasmore’s overly cerebral approach. He read Van Gogh and Cézanne and, concluding that ‘their theories were far in advance of what they were actually ...”

“... made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter Firstbrook’s book is written from a very English perspective, Ghosts of Everest from a very American one: neither takes up the really important issues. The Last Climb began life as a history of all the early Everest expeditions but, once Mallory’s body ...”

“... along: the Battle of Waterloo was a cock-fight between little ‘Boney’ and old ‘Nosey’. As Peter Hofschröer’s elegant and meticulous book shows, Wellington did not escape being cut down to size himself. Wellington’s Smallest Victory describes the model of the battlefield of Waterloo constructed by Captain William Siborne, first exhibited in London ...”

“... as scholars such as Eugene Rice and George Huppert have been doing in the case of Renaissance France. It may also be instructive to compare what the authors say, and do not say, about the place of Cicero in the Renaissance curriculum with the precise and careful essay on ‘Cicero and Tacitus in 16th-century ...”

“... prestige of the Spanish monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers ...”

“... paintings, group portraits in council chambers – were either unavailable or compromised. Even in France, where masterpieces of exhibition painting (like those by Géricault, Delacroix and Courbet) had been produced well into the 19th century, it was the room pictures of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, not the exhibition pictures of the Salon ...”

“... the Revolution of 1789 had specific social origins which produced the political upheaval that left France socially, economically, institutionally and politically altered, never to be the same again. For the Right, this tragedy, for it was no less, was attributable to the failure of the monarchy to share power – at least with the propertied – and to ...”

“... treasure in heaven.’ But this was no ordinary liquidation. With estates in Campania, Sicily, France, Spain, Britain and North Africa, their teenage marriage had joined two of the wealthiest dynasties in the western Mediterranean. The early deaths of two children only strengthened their resolve to become chaste. Outright rejection of family life was ...”

“... Then, in 1942, the war pictures begin: North Africa, Sicily, the D-Day landings, the Liberation of France, the invasion of Germany and the Occupation of Berlin. Peace comes – Picasso, Ingrid Bergman, and a magical picture of diners at the Tour d‘Argent watching Bastille Day fireworks. And there is the last black-framed, boring picture which happens to ...”