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“... a painter was like. As there are very few letters, and very few first-hand accounts of Van Dyck, Robin Blake’s ‘Life’ is inevitably more a ‘Times’. The fact that Van Dyck’s mother died when he was only seven is significant, but to go beyond generalities about early bereavement and look for its results in Van Dyck’s paintings of mother and ...”

“... political figure. In Paris he knew Debussy, while Rodin went so far as to acclaim him as ‘the Blake of the 20th century’. As it happened, Gibran could remember not only his previous reincarnation as William Blake, but also a subsequent incarnation as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. During the First World War he was offered a ...”

“... on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob Hoskins, the interfering ...”

“... not undistinguished author of a good book on Leo Amery among other things, but his co-editor Lord Blake is ... Lord Blake, former Chairman of the Rhodes Trustees, former editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, former ... no, the Disraeli biographer and Tory historian of the Tory Party. Although Lord ...”

“... amid the jingoistic clamour of 1914. Nor is there anything bland or scrubbed-up about Davies’s robin, a creature more terrifying than Ted Hughes’s thrush (‘He sings in triumph that last night/He killed his father in a fight;/And now he’ll take his mother’s blood’), or his description of fields as ‘dewy cemeteries … white with mushroom ...”

“... had been painted on deliberately. He also suggested that the initials ‘S.B.’ stood for Sexton Blake, which is rhyming slang for ‘fake’, and was the monogram used by the forger Tom Keating, after he got caught, to indicate his own work. I think the framer was expecting me to be disappointed, but I was thrilled. The picture is not as old as I ...”

“... traditionally but unimpassionedly been with the Labour Party. Chippindale and Horrie quote Lord Blake on these voters: ‘fairly young, slightly inclined to Labour, largely belonging to the skilled working class, primarily concerned with problems of housing, coloured immigration and the economy (prices and costs) rather than the condition of old-age ...”

“... a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied David Blake with the libretto for his unusual opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an ...”

“... jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little room in South London in the late 1950s,’ he wrote in the introduction to Tales from the Texas Woods, ‘I earned a wonderful living writing about an Arizona ...”

“... unexpectedly included the book in its curriculum for Black students. In 2000, the historian Robin D.G. Kelley, who knew Robinson (he was on Kelley’s dissertation committee), oversaw an American reissue, introducing Black Marxism to a wider audience. Since then, it has become an unlikely handbook for a new generation of radicals and activists.Robinson ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist ...”

“... one way or another Petrarchan: Góngora, Mallarmé, Racine, Shakespeare and – surprisingly – Blake. The activity of translation brings you uniquely close to a writer: you have to find his words again for yourself in your own tongue. Since we cannot translate our own language into itself (or only from texts that have become archaic), it ...”

“... poems, comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the ...”

“... his work, Kathleen Raine wrote, is ‘like standing under a waterfall in full spate’. Like Blake or Stanley Spencer, Redgrove was a great English visionary eccentric whose way of seeing mixed sexuality with a powerful sense of ritual. Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1932, he spent most of his boyhood in a newly built detached suburban house. Its ...”

“... to Stalin or the Croats to Tito until the conference at Udine on the 26th, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Rose Price wrote in his diary on 19 May: ‘Order of most sinister duplicity received i.e. to send Croats to their foes, i.e. Tits to Yugoslavia under the impression they were to go to Italy.’ Thorpe does not quote the even more sinister sentence that ...”