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“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... grew up believing that Seurat and Cézanne had made Piero’s rediscovery possible. Kenneth Clark, who, as director of the National Gallery, should have inquired how Piero’s paintings came to be in his care, even made the absurd claim that the Victorians could never have understood Piero. For all the influence of this book, Longhi has never been ...”

“... If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was attached to the lyric modernism of Baudelaire and Mallarmé’s later writing ...”

“... fall of Milosevic, which was brilliant.’ But there are some great little sketches, as when Alan Clark is added to a North London dinner party as a last-minute guest. The Braggs arrived and Melvyn was horrified. He said he loathed Alan C. Alan and Jane arrived in one of his Bentleys, which could barely squeeze through the two lines of parked cars ...”

“... might have issued from Christ’s breast.The consummation imagined here is tellingly related in David Kennedy’s astute essay on Prince’s ‘Portrayal of National Bodies’ to a notebook entry the poet made in 1950, which details a bored church elder haunted by a ‘dream of naked man, opening his arms, receiving love and death upon his bare ...”

“... on a stock image developed over centuries, by painters especially. Brueghel in the 16th century, David Teniers in the 17th, and Joseph Wright in the 18th, all painted grimy scenes of reclusion and penury, with hints of mad obsession and radiant wonder. Cornelis Pietersz Bega’s alchemist, from 1663, adds pathos to the mix: were it not for the delicately ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... introduced Bacon to collectors and galleries and other painters, even persuading Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, to visit Bacon’s studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show and Sutherland ...”

“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to ...”

“... Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine ...”

“... what makes him such a disastrously blinkered critic, at once ill-tempered, dogmatic and smug. His Clark Lectures (1954-5) and Oxford Addresses on Poetry (1961) are packed with denunciations of just about any poet you care to name – Milton, Pope, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas ... Graves also ...”

“... Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain ...”

“... more tolerant, on men with pony-tails or long, curly hair. There is no interest, for example, in David Bowie’s floral dress or Boy George’s Body Map kilt or the many other examples of drag or quasi-drag one might think of. Essential modernity, in the form of the neoclassical male silhouette, is here to stay. The modern suit provides us all with ‘a ...”

“... endless barrage of requests, as in the unpunctuated pique of his reply to William Tierney Clark, engineer to the West Middlesex Water Company, in 1831: ‘You seem to imagine that I can answer all sorts of questions and that too when you put them almost in the manner of riddles for you tell me nothing relative to the green substance which you sent me ...”

“... for even partial success. John Ross was to look for a northwest passage through Baffin Bay; David Buchan was to head north past Spitsbergen, with luck into the open polar sea and out the Bering Strait into the Pacific. On 29 August, Ross entered Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island. If only he’d known it, he’d found the way into the northwest ...”