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“... The 19th century loved George Sand: the Brownings, the Carlyles, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ruskin, Whitman all read her; Arnold preferred her to Dickens; George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were influenced by her; G.H. Lewes in a rash moment called her the most remarkable writer of the century. Henry James, of all people, loved her ‘serene volubility ...”

“... Fabio​ Barry’s book about stones alters our understanding of the sacred, or at least symbolic, nature of much of the great architecture of the past. In addition to his command of specialist modern scholarship in several languages, he has studied many old and often obscure texts, and supplies translations of these ...”

“... can’t let him go, there’s a three-quarters cold case they need his help with. And Sebastian Barry is a writer who in his darksome romances offers, perhaps even craves, proximity to popular films, to genre, to Westerns and war movies and noir. He does a stunning set piece, often of a violent nature (say, the all-Ireland boxing match in A Long Long Way ...”

“... Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its origins. The first horns sent signals across dark forests; they called the clan together, like Ralph’s conch ...”

“... built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’ A Secret Service chief disappears in Joseph Hone’s The Flowers of the Forest and ambiguous allegiances are disentangled in a quest across Europe, as well as back in time to the Cambridge of Philby – actually, to a stop on the Oxford to Cambridge line, on the assumption that Oxford, too, had its ...”

“... front room and boring nights at the local disco. The matter is put rather well by Kathleen Barry, the author of a book called Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Duke, £13.99), as she tries to conjure with the vast investment of feeling that the job represented as early as 1933: A reporter from the Toledo Sunday Times took dramatic ...”

“... exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ...”

“... who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s anti-authoritarian ...”

“... end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds was ...”

“... intellectual (with a high-pitched voice) who became the stormtroopers’ greatest propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Yet the trial was not completely unfair. Justice Quartus De Wet, who heard the case, had all the normal white South African prejudices, but Joffe believes he was his own man and not a politicians’ puppet. Certainly, De Wet saw right through ...”

“... Marquise de Merteuil. Laclos himself makes several cameos in the book, usually in the company of Joseph-Alexandre, vicomte de Ségur, his patron and an ambitious author in his own right. (Sade, by contrast, is strangely absent from Craveri’s account, even though his arrest during the Terror was triggered by his request for a commission from another of her ...”

“... in the sense that they have a literary source. Unlike Thackeray’s mock romance The Luck of Barry Lyndon or Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (which became Eyes Wide Shut), Nabokov’s Lolita had a well-known identity as to plot and style. Lolita pushed a non-moral aestheticism to the limit, and tested that limit. The narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a collector ...”

“... inherent in the act of theatre-going – an ambiguity exploited to fullest effect by the art of Barry Humphries. Perhaps because I have spent so much time over so many years watching television at home, the act of theatregoing now strikes me as more than ever peculiar, almost a little crazy – an excitingly ancient anachronism and an undertaking fraught ...”

“... Musicians were said to like it because the walls were thick: Caruso, Toscanini, Stravinsky. Later Barry Manilow played piano in the basement (no wall thick enough). The building is beautifully described by Bellow in Seize the Day. The Chelsea makes many more star appearances, but it’s the denizens of the place, their celebrity and sheer numbers – from ...”

“... a month later.) Twenty minutes later gunmen entered a house in Ballydougan and shot and killed Joseph O’Dowd and his nephews Barry and Declan, all of them members of the SDLP. In 1999 Ian Paisley, under parliamentary privilege, claimed that Eugene Reavey, another brother, had ‘set up the Kingsmill massacre’, but ...”