“... period of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Siblings (published in 1963 but only recently translated into English), when an artist’s career could be threatened because a welder didn’t like the way they had painted an acetylene flame.* Richter could have had a successful career as a muralist in the GDR but, unlike Elisabeth, the painter in the novel, he was not ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... was cycled back into art – think of the lush bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does Tzara, not to ...”

“... Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”

“... of formal policy-maker have come to the fore. There are the passive functionaries – men like Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East; he travels here and there but because he is a career Arabist his influence is nil. More ominous are the ideological over-achievers, typified by Richard Perle in ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... of the earlier volumes, but, having made available one of the finest collections of letters in English, he could afford to ignore them. It is easy to see that Shaw irritated people in late as in early life. Being vain and assertive, or finding it convenient to wear a mask of assertive vanity, he writes in the same breezily authoritative tone on virtually ...”

“... be confined to university departments of literature. This desire to ‘keep philosophy pure’ (in Richard Rorty’s phrase) has more to do with professional self-esteem than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of ...”

“... Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann’.) Kaye offered to translate Jobert’s speech, to be given in English, into French, so that his French colleagues would understand what their minister was saying. But after Jobert had delivered an elegant toast in English, Danny Kaye got up and spoke French-sounding gibberish in a ...”

“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the ...”

“... of the impending DISASTER were the show to go ahead, and the items were hurriedly withdrawn. When Richard Offner ventured some mildly incredulous notices of an exhibition in 1924, Berenson’s fury knew no bounds, and he severed relations with the erring disciple. There were instances, admittedly (though none too many), when he stubbornly refused to gratify ...”

“... retrospectively – to condition his or her subject’s story by reading in from the work itself. Richard Bradford’s recent life of Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear, seems to illustrate the belief that the man who wrote ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘High Windows’ must have lived like Mr Bleaney but with higher windows: Bradford describes him, during 1955, as a ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”