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“... attitude of one who is about to play; he was probably a banker’s son. In 1769 Wright painted Mrs John Ashton. The Quakerish modesty of her black and white dress is belied by its gloss. Her late husband had been in the slave trade. Mrs Sarah Clayton (a courtesy ‘Mrs’, she was unmarried) held a leading position in the coal trade in Liverpool; she points to ...”

“... books published to mark the opening of the new galleries supports this view of Turner’s genius. John Gage ends his introduction with a remark made by Lawrence Gowing in 1966: ‘It is not certain that we are yet prepared to see Turner whole.’ Gage reckons it is time to renew the attempt. He uses another quotation from Gowing to epitomise the Modernist ...”

“... of its maturity’, without trying to find validation for that style in personal tragedy, as John Berger apparently did. For Berger, Hyman writes, ‘the late nudes were the sole redeeming component in an oeuvre otherwise “intimate, contemplative, privileged”; it was the “tragedy” of his relationship with Marthe that “ensured his survival as a ...”

“... wasn’t in any case very enthusiastic about Nicholson’s work at that stage). But John Piper, who had tried his hand at pure abstraction, had by now turned to topography and was therefore recruited; and when Clark was shown Moore’s first shelter drawings, he was able to say that there was no reason now for Moore to fight shy of being a war ...”

“... of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop in the new ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in ...”

“... a legend as man of action was a large part of their stock in trade. The South African poet Roy Campbell, who was a world-class liar, influenced Van der Post at an impressionable age. (‘I have no moral objection to lies,’ the young Van der Post wrote in his diary, but, he added, ‘they must be well done and contain imaginative qualities. Roy’s were ...”

“... the best example of this is the investigation carried out by Manchester Deputy Chief Constable, John Stalker, into an alleged ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy in Northern Ireland. In January 1988, the then Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, told the Commons that, given certain ‘considerations of national security’, no charges would be brought against eight ...”

“... in one slogan or its antithesis. There’s nothing in between. Mansergh continues: ‘Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman, who critically exposes Britain’s nuclear policies and installations, was knocked off his bicycle and his papers ransacked.’ The paragraph spacing that follows this sentence leaves us a moment’s contemplation, before we reach ...”

“... him to be disturbed by conflicting allegiances in a way which is not foreign to readers of, say, John le Carré’s stories. Picking up such parallels is one pleasure. A deeper reason for the effectiveness of the books is the escape they offer from present anxiety into past discomfort. When Aubrey sets sail for the East Indies with the British envoy, Edward ...”

“... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...”

“... parliamentarians are a socially conformist bunch: they shopped for furniture and fabrics at John Lewis, Harrods, Laura Ashley, Heal’s, the House of Fraser, Debenhams, Habitat, IKEA, BoConcept and OKA; when looking for deals they went to Argos, Currys, Comet, Marks & Sparks, B&Q and Woolworths, until it closed. They love their gardens, and spent ...”

“... mundane infrastructure becomes poetry. They aren’t as majestic as great masonry multi-spans like John Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge (with its demolition in the 1930s the Thames lost its finest crossing), or as Promethean in their ambitions as the great American suspension bridges, but the low curves of Maillart’s spans manage to look as if, for once, an ...”

“... lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them ...”

“... tripe she borrowed. My copies of Hemingway’s Fiesta, Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son and John Braine’s Room at the Top (a first edition) have the faint purple imprint of Fincham’s rubber stamp on their flyleaf. These did not go into the Essex ditches. I also toyed with keeping Forever Amber (recalling it as being ‘hot’), but let it go. I kept ...”