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“... mischief, and it was impossible not to like him. Sullivan, twenty-five years Tate’s junior and a close but respectful friend, is an accomplished writer, and he makes it easy to understand why so many people were willing to put up, and drink too much, with this toplofty, Catholic-bohemian, gossiping, womanising sage. Sullivan remarks, with characteristic ...”

“... symbolism’ – echoing the advice of Dionysius the Areopagite that symbols should not cleave too close to their referents – Steinberg cites the 13th-century sage Durandus, who said that one can represent the Church as a harlot ‘because she is called out of many nations, and because she closeth not her bosom against any that return to her’. He can find ...”

“... towers above, sandwich shops below’. Westminster Cathedral and the Army and Navy Stores are close by. A smelly beggar holds out a McDonald’s paper cup. There is a carving, by Eric Gill, of Jesus before Pilate. We are told about Eric Gill and his smock, chiselling Pilate in Hoptonwood limestone. In another place relevance is discovered at length in an ...”

“... as he squatted. Little sprigs and twists of coarse hair were on his thighs and on his face, where close shaving had pock-marked the skin. He never replied to the shouts of the owner, whom he could so easily have knocked down. He just kept on working. Willie’s wife explains why this outrage was possible: the tiler was illegitimate; colonial Portuguese ...”

“... Lanier. Burgess might have liked that idea, which has a certain glamour because of Lanier’s close connection with the astrologer Simon Forman, a man who kept a journal record of his sexual conquests. He also saw Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline at the Globe, and brought off a final trick, not all that wonderful if you think about it, by ...”

“... modern sense of ‘reckless’ – the original has ‘rechles mirthes’. He wants to keep as close as possible to the original, and would not, like these more recent translators, have supposed that archaism was a hindrance to his doing so. When the music stops Arthur and his brilliant company at the Christmas feast are suddenly confronted by an ...”

“... in the world of London finance. Brother Henry lived, ‘in the high style expected of a banker’, close to where Harrods now stands. He was duly bankrupted in the slump that followed the end of the war in 1815. The class of gentry that had £400 to £600 a year, the class of the Austen women, is said to have been the hardest hit, their ...”

“... passion, he does, however, confess to one passionate hope: that as a writer he may become as close to immortality as it is possible to be. This aspiration may excuse some eccentric behaviour; having been a rather unwilling partner at the time, Dr Frankl remembers with scorn Coetzee’s attempt to make love in time to the slow movement of Schubert’s C ...”

“... the United States she has been largely unknown.’ This is all to the advantage of Katherine Frank, a lecturer from Iowa, who has produced this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His ...”

“... for example-and her own work in Family Planning get adequate space. She is sometimes surprisingly frank about her failings; and her comments on the failings of some hotels and more or less identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too ...”

“... alien universe, of accommodations never to be effected even in a palinode, runs a long history of close social observation in American fiction. Even businessmen, from W.D.Howell’s Silas Lapham down to Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (of The Financier and The Titan) and John O’Hara’s Alfred Eaton (From the Terrace), have ...”

“... Frank Auerbach is a serious painter. His retrospective at the Royal Academy, which has given over its main rooms to a show spanning nearly fifty years of his work, is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap ...”

“... twenty years. However, he is by vocation a philosopher, of distinctive orientation since he has close dealings with Emerson and William James as well as with Wittgenstein, and with Hollywood comedies as well as with Thoreau; and he often turns to Shakespeare for contributions to philosophical issues, confident that he explores ‘the depth of the ...”

“... the cast of mind of a community may be better known through its response to ephemera than by the close investigation of its accepted classics. Bibliographers have been led by such considerations to add habits of reading, and the messages the cost, format, design and illustration of texts may have carried, to their traditional concerns – which centre on the ...”

“... at the top of their power. They stood for pain. The stone on my other side was in memory of ‘Frank Cyril Nicholson, who died January 13th 1897, aged 14 years’. It was a cool day, very quiet at times, then some horn or deep engine on the dual carriageway would break in. Frank Cyril died after 14 years; died, it ...”