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“... cloud at the end of Schumann’s life has been seen as overshadowing everything on the way, but John Worthen’s biography refuses idle teleology. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Nottingham, Worthen has written about D.H. Lawrence and the Wordsworth circle and makes no claim to musical expertise; but he has been seized by the Schumann ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... bite like a dog’, otherwise they become ‘an affront’. Like his contemporaries, della Casa took for granted that laughter was mainly an expression of scorn – ‘it being a mark of greater contempt to laugh at a person, than to do him any real injury’. As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, ‘the occasion of laughter and the mean that ...”

“... rule, tens of thousands more have been disclosed to the Undercover Policing Inquiry chaired by Sir John Mitting. The inquiry was ordered in 2015 by Theresa May, then home secretary, after it was revealed that the police had spied on the family and friends of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in Eltham in South-East London in 1993 in a racist attack by a gang ...”

“... of sterile lesbian passion, and Mme Roberts satisfactorily preserved her reputation. Pabst took immense care over physical details. Louise Brooks, who was used to choosing her own costumes (Paramount had let her play a manicurist in a $500 beaded evening dress), found Pabst selecting everything – ‘from an ermine coat to my girdle’. His final ...”

“... perfectly squared, without the least winding or washboarding – flat as a sheet of plate glass. John Hersey, The Walnut Door three four knock at the door – imagine the door as subject no mystery just a coathanger a formal object on which for some reason you’ve to drape its own history – how it began – is began better than started? – began as the ...”

“... at the National Gallery from October until January – The Quintet of the Astonished, which took as a starting point Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Mocked, was much admired when it was shown there in 2000. The clarity and sharpness of the images on the screen in which heads changed in slow motion – so slow that it ...”

“... amassing a huge fortune as a royal servant, it is certainly unlikely. Apsley’s mother was a St John, from an elder branch of the same family as Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St John, whose daughter married Apsley’s cousin Sir Walter St John, denounced by his Royalist opponents ...”

“... contact with London than with one another. When the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, John Adams reported that the delegates were ‘strangers’, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences. What then explains the road to independence? While most accounts of the coming of the Revolution focus on protests in eastern cities against British ...”

“... She hasn’t even managed to persuade Sammy Wilson to wear a mask. When a Ballymena councillor, John Carson, said the pandemic was God’s judgment on Northern Ireland for introducing abortion and same-sex marriage, Foster failed to discipline him. When the same councillor alleged that Covid vaccines were made from the stem cells of aborted foetuses – a ...”

“... which made him bewray his credit’. Historians have wondered what form this literary laxative took. Some suggest that Jonson is guyed as big morose Ajax in Troilus and Cressida (with, according to Honigmann, the diminutive epigrammist John Weever as Thersites). Others say Jonson is a model for Jaques, the embittered ...”

“... attitude of one who is about to play; he was probably a banker’s son. In 1769 Wright painted Mrs John Ashton. The Quakerish modesty of her black and white dress is belied by its gloss. Her late husband had been in the slave trade. Mrs Sarah Clayton (a courtesy ‘Mrs’, she was unmarried) held a leading position in the coal trade in Liverpool; she points to ...”

“... of Dali and Céline, yet to have strained out any relish or abandon from the mixture. He took his pleasures sadly. Impersonalised or even brutalised gay sex, while it had been tried before all right, was something he both cottoned to and helped to proselytise for. The essential figure in the world of the Factory was either a runaway boy or a ...”

“... had no idea of the aggressive manner of this mob. Outraged by the elusiveness of their prey, they took to publishing allegations about Blunt which had no foundation at all: notably that he was responsible for the deaths of 49 wartime Dutch special agents, a story the Sunday Telegraph refused to retract and which is still repeated.Some latent reservoir of ...”