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“... of women at the end of the 19th century. Gissing’s The Odd Women is one of them. Another is Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book, published in 1897. One would expect the man’s treatment of the subject to differ from the woman’s, but though the two books are as dissimilar as they could be, the difference has little to do with gender. From the point of ...”

“... of the forces that seek to exploit it.In 1816, the artist Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes created the Grand Prix de Rome du paysage historique with the aim of rejuvenating historical painting through landscape. It encouraged artists to paint in the open air and Rousseau was hooked. In 1829, however, he withdrew from the competition, disillusioned with the strict ...”

“... any poison attending the corpse, and he would have survived essentially unscathed. This was the Grand Guignol stage on which Joseph Lister – the subject of Lindsey Fitzharris’s agreeably grisly and fastidiously detailed book The Butchering Art – took his place. Born into a Quaker family, Lister was tall, handsome and abstemious. He stammered and was ...”

“... Milton, but Milton studies never even faltered. Indeed, important books like Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style were conceived of as counterblasts to the Leavis-Eliot offensive. Barbara Everett’s piece is too: her starting-point is Eliot’s treatment of Milton’s name-dropping in the first of his essays on that poet – treatment which she proves to be ...”

“... encomium calls ‘New Zealand’s most venerated writer’, Jack Macalister. Present is wife Sarah, who urges those present to read his books, the Macalister girls Dora and Emily, twenty years apart in age, and Jack’s friend and first publisher Charles Bremner, who was also Sarah’s lover. Funeral and reception ...”

“... continue a quarrel about the past.At the heart of the quarrel is the memory of an actress called Sarah, who once rivalled Fabienne in the cinema and in Lumir’s affections. Sarah drowned when she went swimming after drinking too much – some critics believe the character is modelled on Deneuve’s sister, Françoise ...”

“... and unthinking, vengeful behaviour on the ground. Two cases stand out: those of Myra Hindley and Sarah Payne. In both public fury has prevailed over fairness, the interests of the bereaved over those of the community as a whole. In 1966, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were convicted of the murder of two children whom they had abducted and tortured. They received ...”

“... my companions, one of whom I already knew a little as the cold and formidable daughter of rather grand friends of my parents. It was because she was crying, and because I instinctively knew that the next day she would still seem cold and formidable, that I at once recognised that the place set a challenge which would demand all the stoic endurance a child ...”

“... Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man ...”

“... Sarah Bernhardt’s strangest gift – or so it seems a hundred years after the fact – was her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey young D.H. Lawrence, for example. In 1908, having seen her perform one of her signature roles – Marguerite, the doomed courtesan in La Dame aux camélias – Lawrence sounds like a decadent schoolgirl on heat: ‘Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther’s fascination and fury, sobbing and sighing like a deer sobs, wounded to death, and all the time with the sheen of silk, the glitter of diamonds … She represents the primeval passions of woman, and she is fascinating to an extraordinary degree ...”

“... whose combination of rationality and originality with occasional compression makes him a sort of grand panjandrum to Hazzard. Cliffs of Fall takes its name from a sonnet by Hopkins; the influence of Victorian literature can be felt in the balance and decorum Hazzard practised throughout her writing. She seems terminally incapable of producing an ugly ...”

“... called the Wordsworths, a brother and sister, about whom Sam was wildly enthusiastic but whom Sarah correctly divined to be a dire threat. What was so objectionable about these Wordsworths? Well, to begin with they were so quietly but insufferably pleased with themselves, so convinced that they represented sensibility in its highest form. Then William was ...”

“... from the novels, restricted to the work of seven novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the ...”

“... It’s one of the few pavilions to have remained unchanged. The only advantage given to it by Sarah Lucas, so insightful in interview, so frustrating in practice, is the marigold yellow interiors (she calls them ‘deep cream’) which set off the pale terracotta façade nicely. Inside the plaster casts of her female friends’ lower halves – some ...”

“... or his influence. Whistler mostly couldn’t be bothered to learn from other artists. He knew many grand people, from Baudelaire to Wilde to Proust, and basked in the admiration of some important painters, notably Degas and Monet, but his comments on art were either self-inflating pronouncements or insults (a Sargent portrait, he said, showed the ‘cleverness ...”