“... his post-Cambridge dedication to social justice (Berger), through an English left aestheticism (Morris), passing on to a Natural Aesthetic (Ruskin). In the event, the conference was called ‘The State of British Art’. It was held in February 1978, ran from Friday night through to Sunday evening, and was packed out. It did not include figures to argue for ...”

“... of Indiana, secretary to the US navy in the 1870s, went so far as to argue that the economics of David Hume and Adam Smith was a bogus science, a put-up job: ‘This new science … would not, in all probability, have acquired the designation of a science at all, if it had not been found that its free-trade principles were necessary to the commercial ...”

“... Bletchley. In 1940 he had met an attractive, capable, independent-minded Girtonian called Jennifer Morris, daughter of the town clerk of Westminster; the couple were married early in 1945 – the reception was at the Savoy; Attlee made the principal speech – and it remained a close, mutually supportive marriage, of a distinctly traditional kind, for the ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... of pleasure.’ There were jobs for all, but few could yet afford even a little Standard or Morris Ten, and most had never dreamt of Mediterranean tours. Seaside holidays boomed. ‘The late Forties marked the peak of the Victorian resorts.’ Billy Butlin, who had invented the holiday camp and had opened two in the late Thirties, had provided three ...”

“... sample by Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, yet even in this respect Hawking’s book has almost certainly outdone any of Penrose’s brilliant, but bristly and bulky popularisations. (A Brief History of Time is 256 pages long and a documentary about Hawking with the ...”

“... of silence. I was recently struck by this relationship of music to silence when I saw the Mark Morris Dance Group perform ‘Neue Liebeslieder Walzer’ to the music of Brahms. At the end of the work, when the dance has subsided into a circular tableau of figures sleeping in the shadows, at the precise moment when the sound of the last note is about to ...”

“... as with Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in England, there is an evil, compelling genius – David Blakeley, murdered by her as her only escape – or, as with Myra Hindley, an evil, compelling ‘mad’ genius, Ian Brady, virtually taking over her soul by making her do the most unimaginable harm to innocent children. Women’s crimes or even ...”

“... beginning to try some people’s patience. The sneer at the 90 per cent collectors is indicative. Morris Louis and Jules Olitski had one-man shows at French & Co that year, with Cubist structure and physical wallops of paint deliberately nowhere to be seen. There was a show of Roy Lichtenstein at Condon Riley in June, still safely Ab Ex. But something was ...”

“... which has been awaiting repair for many months. Inside, rampaging grandchildren zoom about. A keen Morris dancer with a countryman’s voice, he was largely responsible for Chevaline, the naval update of Polaris in the Seventies. As I talked to him, he sat by his fire enjoying the fact that he seems more like Falstaff than Dr Strangelove. But when he talks ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

“... in London the father worked as a volunteer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in Hammersmith, where she was a pupil, Heshu repeatedly expressed her fear of a forced marriage, but teachers ignored her. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – her ...”

“... field. Perhaps because of her background in dance – she has written a wonderful book on Mark Morris and edited an unexpurgated version of Nijinsky’s diaries* – Acocella locates herself, figuratively speaking, at a kind of middle distance from her subjects: as if she were watching them from a well-placed seat (perhaps thirty or forty feet away?) in a ...”

“... English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early ...”

“... we built a raft from old oil-drums, and, too afraid to sail on it ourselves, we tethered one of David Luck’s hapless chickens to its deck and sent it on a squawking unhappy journey downstream. Another time we constructed an elaborate camp on a small island in the middle of a pond with a rope drawbridge worked by discarded bell-ropes from the Church.I only ...”