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“... lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you shrieking, Colonel?’ One hopes that he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of ...”

“... the war. The reception of Freddie’s death – both the scale it was on and the form it took – astounded me. I still cannot decide what it showed. One claim that was made was that with Freddie’s death popularised philosophy, too, was dead. After Russell, he was the last person who could, at any rate within the English-speaking world, make ...”

“... Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there are details of studio practice. The stages whereby a malleable clay face or figure metamorphosed into marble ...”

“... his demise was deliberately accelerated by a doctor. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s physician? Why was he in such agonising pain? Was pneumonia the true cause of his death? To this day there are those who are convinced that poison was administered to Prince Eddy under ...”

“... comparatively rare is the expression ‘I don’t know,’ and to admit that arguing with (say) John Wesley, or Bertolt Brecht, or even – to be banal – Roger Scruton, would be a pretty grim business. Part of the reason for closure, or for manic pedagogy, must be political, in the widest sense of the word. Having launched a social campaign, or founded a ...”

“... where the decision was arrived at. Wherever the examining committee sat, it plainly met in what it took to be an hour of crisis. Noting, to quote from Dame Helen’s report on its proceedings, that ‘with the exception of Ted Hughes ... post-war English poetry has not been exciting,’ it discovered also that ‘the American poets of the post-war period were ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... prosecution case against Edgar A. Poe looks a strong one. Taken in by the Richmond tobacco broker John Allan when left orphaned at the age of two by the death of his actress mother Eliza, brought up as a member of the family and sent to the University of Virginia, he responded by running up gambling debts and drinking, so that he left after a ...”

“... as MI5, continued to expand even after the end of the Cold War, and by 1992, when Stella Rimington took over, it had more than 2300 staff. The volume of material circulated by GCHQ, the signals intelligence agency, and by SIS, the overseas intelligence service, also ensures them a significant place in government. In 1995, ...”

“... diminished. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), a pivotal Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indians had a ‘right of occupancy’, but were not full owners of their land as whites understood it. Nonetheless, to the end of the 19th century, even as the federal government forcibly expelled Indians from the eastern half of the ...”

“... preaching in Chitterne, the next village. His son, another Henry, my father’s grandfather, took their trade – bricklaying – and their religion south to Portsmouth. Shrewton is halfway between Salisbury and Devizes, on the old road between London and Warminster, a position that made it less dependent on the sheep and corn farming from which most ...”

“... Canaletto left elegant depictions of its Round Pond, from where elm pipes and the force of gravity took water to much of Central London. Nowadays, the New River flows into the great Ring Main, a kind of H2O M25. The supply began with individual enterprise when, around 1600, Edmund Colthurst, an Elizabethan man of parts, sought royal approval of his plans. By ...”

“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... Nessie Dunsmuir. She seems to have borne their hardship with remarkable fortitude, but it clearly took its toll on them both: ‘Living mainly on bread and potatoes and some fish and mussels and not having enough paraffin for cooking got us down and a wee bit undernourished,’ Graham reported to a friend at one point. Hard liquor was a large part of the hard ...”