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“... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and ...”

“... drunk at the same fountains long before,’ Leigh Fermor explains. In Classics Transformed (1998), Christopher Stray reveals (citing a letter from Leigh Fermor) that they went on to discuss heatedly their rival pronunciations of Latin. That shared culture may actually be dead, and that story’s significance may live on only in the eye of sentiment, but I feel ...”

“... Christopher Wren, England’s best known architect and one of its greatest natural philosophers, experimented with everything: stone and wood, cones and domes, animals and men. He liked to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, the motion of a planetary model into liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of ancient astronomy ...”

“... wanted men about him that were fat. He couldn’t have anticipated the tactless cheerleading of Nicholas Soames, who’s been penalised horribly for saying what seems unarguably true. But then, you can’t argue with media burn either. People feel that they know her. They don’t feel they know him. The vicarious identification wins out every time. I ...”

“... the pavement outside. Martin Amis remembers her showing up at the end of a dinner, on the arm of Nicholas Soames, and seating herself at the piano to sing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (to which, of course, the only answer was ‘no he ain’t’). Two members of the New Left Review editorial board, known to me, were confronted by her at some do or ...”

“... The special venom we reserve for collaborators has something defensive about it, as though we reviled them so as to separate ourselves from them, warding off the fear that in their situation we might have acted as they did. Trial of Strength is written in the conviction that those who have never known the dilemmas of the subject in an occupied state, are in no position to judge those who have ...”

“... that the garden belonged to the widow of Scotland’s first Freudian psychoanalyst and father of Nicholas Fairbaim MP.) Various academics, actors, politicians – Labour and Nationalist – were there: Godfrey Quigley, playing Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken ...”

“... Montjoy. Marie Mountjoy, of Silver Street, near the Barbican, ran a business with her husband, Christopher, making ‘tires’, ornamental headwear fashionable among ladies at court (‘tires’ were elaborate compounds of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the ...”

“... an idea. A whole country.Wystan was the first person to go to Iceland, did you know that? And Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America. Wystan did.While this seems to me a true assessment of Britten’s early relationship with Auden it also chimes with my experiences in 1960. So, though in some ways I find Britten unsympathetic he, much more than ...”

“... its and the country’s affairs is also to be found in the essays on economic and social policy. Christopher Huhne, in a characteristically incisive piece, develops a powerful argument for the left liberal programme as against the left Keynesian one which came close to predominating in the Labour Party in the late Seventies and early Eighties. ‘There is a ...”

“... before Thatcher carried the vote of no confidence in Callaghan, she had commissioned her friend Nicholas Ridley to design a campaign of revenge on the mineworkers, and to ensure that all the arsenals and all the tactical designs were in place in advance. Nigel Lawson, who was later to cover himself with glory as Energy Secretary in this bannered ...”

“... that still ruled Europe in the years before 1914, Wilhelm’s inordinate loquacity stood out. Tsar Nicholas II was retiring by nature and George V was painfully shy. Scarcely a peep was heard in public from the elderly Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, a notoriously austere and laconic figure. And the contrast is heightened in retrospect by the fact that ...”

“... whose work fits most closely into the tradition of Synge’s dramaturgy. His monologue St Nicholas is literally a story (about vampires, as it happens) told in the past tense by a single character to the audience; his hugely successful play The Weir has the same structure as Pinter’s The Homecoming (a man brings a woman into a close-knit group with ...”

“... administrators in the decades after the Seven Years’ War. Would it be possible for Britain, in Christopher Brown’s provocative phrase, to envision an empire without slavery?† Sharp was one of many theorists who believed that it was, and Sierra Leone – like similar proposals to create free-black British colonies in Florida or Honduras – was designed ...”

“... White House reconciles its Middle East strategy with the Book of Daniel. In the past few months, Christopher Hitchens has been shouting at many of these people on conservative talk shows. Keith Allen, who travelled to Kansas earlier this year to make a Channel 4 programme about the founders of the ‘God Hates Fags’ website, ended up screaming ...”