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“... means of a uniquely dramatised form of ideology and propaganda. This is the view of Hitler as Pied Piper. It is strongly evoked by the cover of the Stachura volume, which depicts the Nazis marching through the Brandenburg Gate on the night Hitler became Chancellor, lights and swastikas creating an atmosphere of gaudy, sinister theatricality. It is a compelling ...”

“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely means just illustrating the image ...”

“... up the newish streets of artificial stone where dozens of the men scorched and drowned in the Piper Alpha disaster had their homes. Now I can see the clump of trees in the Garden of Remembrance where we scattered my aunt’s ashes eighteen months ago, a grey drift like melting hailstones on the turf below a larch tree. This year’s journeys set me ...”

“... In​ the spring of 1972, the poet Bernadette Mayer began to keep a journal for her analyst, David Rubinfine, whose patients included Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and who was notorious for having married another patient, Elaine May, a decade earlier. Mayer was 27. In the journal – there were two, in fact; Rubinfine read one while she wrote in the other – she attempted to record her states of consciousness ...”

“... village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and William Piper, arrived uninvited and stayed smoking and drinking (‘sponging,’ their host records bitterly) until they began to quarrel, because Tho. Fuller told that which in my opinion was really true, viz., Master Piper, being ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... inspired series produced by the dream ticket of Betjeman’s enthusiasm (and pen) married to John Piper’s eye (and camera). Nevertheless, they and the largely still-born series of Murray’s Guides bear little relation to the approach taken in the huge, slightly later Buildings of England, a proposal which Pevsner had first put to Allen Lane in the early ...”

“... store is attacked by its own dummies and has to be blown up. Rose continues to be played by Billie Piper, the former teen pop star, with an air of triumph, richly deserved. Part angel, part goblin, blessed with the most wide and wanton smile, Piper delivers what the role asks for: a young woman able to appear both ordinary ...”

“... make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have stepped so easily or so politely onto Mrs ...”

“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... like Punch – like an Andean shepherd steering his flock through a clouded pass – like the Pied Piper playing us into the hillside: contradictory symbols have begun to form. Commitment time. From now on each perch will be precarious, spreadeagled; retreat from the razor-edge no easier than what lies ahead. As I cling to take a runner off, my fingers chill ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”

“... to it, on the great things achieved by those other geniuses (MacDiarmid, Rimbaud, MacCrimmon the piper, this Ch’an master and that Kakamura scholar) whose names White drps in what reads uncomfortably like a way of acquiring credentials at second hand. Scot. I like the etymology of that word as ‘wanderer’. Yes, that’s it. The extravagant ...”

“... candidate from the minuscule parliamentary left. This strategy had worked before: last time round David Miliband nominated Diane Abbott as a candidate. In 2015 they hoped a left candidate would take away support from Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may ...”

“... was all due to CIA machinations was resurrected by Frances Stonor Saunders in Who Paid the Piper? (1999). Saunders does an excellent job in tracing the financial and organisational trail left by the CIA’s involvement in cultural politics. She has little to say, however, about the content of the books or magazines that the CIA helped fund, the ...”