Search Results

“... depicted them as a literary fab foursome, with Knausgaard the cute Paul and Fosse the spiritual George.) Fosse did once dabble in painting, though his greater passion was for music (‘I came to writing from rock music. A kind of almost imperceptible transition, from the guitar to the typewriter’) and there’s a scene in Septology in which the teenage ...”

“... ignorant and unnecessary: ‘I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art,’ he said to George Moore, ‘and they have not understood ... but among people who understand words are not necessary: you say humph, he, ha, and everything has been said.’ Critics not only rush in where there is nothing to be said, what they do say is glib: ‘Painting is ...”

“... to cover his armchairs.Worboys describes the ‘Canine Castle’, the dog-dealing emporium of Bill George, a ‘nobby West End butcher’ (‘nobby’ was London slang for those with social pretensions), who was known as the ‘Father of the Fancy’. The Fancy was a loose fraternity of working-class men with a passion for pub-based blood sports. (Charles ...”

“... second ‘a’ from his surname in 1909 at the insistence of his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, also a painter, who was ashamed of his nephew’s ‘depraved’ art.) His father, the first Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, was a headteacher, an important local figure in the arch-conservative Orthodox Protestant sect. Mondrian was given his father’s name because he was ...”

“... poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long ...”

“... they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he ...”

“... go … if those millions went – not just the house in the Hamptons, the rooftop suite at the George V in Paris, the account at Asprey’s in London, but most important, control of the Mulholland Trust. That was what Louise prized most; that was the future. Glass spends his happiest moments with his mistress, Alison, a young Irish ...”

“... a collection of miniatures which would include at least one signed example by every miniature painter ever to have worked in the British Isles. Six years later, in 2019, the Grantchester Collection – more than forty British miniatures from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries – was given to the museum by Lady Grantchester, the sister of Sir Peter ...”

“... unwelcome foreign influence, while Queen Anne’s union with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ George of Denmark inspired little enthusiasm. Neither marriage was in living memory but Albert had arrived at a moment when the British were much preoccupied with reconsidering their past. In particular, in the wake of Catholic emancipation and with the Oxford ...”

“... because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t understand.’) H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan subsidised their succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard ...”

“... all excited by the fact that Mary was being made love to at the time in peculiar ways by a young painter called Kenneth Callahan (her own technical defloration had occurred a couple of years earlier) and was also involved, though not seriously, with a green-eyed lesbian of 35 called Czerna Wilson, who wore her bronze hair in a pigtail that reached her ...”

“... been led to expect insights a little sharper than those on show here. This story of Margery and George Ince, living in Rome, where George is employed by some sort of multinational philanthropic and acronymic organisation, falls into the same painless slot as Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred. The story turns on the ...”

“... laugh. I heard later that the two had become buddies and worked together in some way. Perhaps the painter got the chauffeur’s job. While writing this diary I’m thinking about conversation, real and reported, the talk of the young and the old. Art education has hardly anything to do with reading books and being able to write, these silent activities. The ...”

“... In 1911, George Santayana gave an address to the Philosophical Union of the University of California in which he sought to identify and define what he called, in his lecture title, ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’. Santayana had a bracing view of what it was ‘to possess a living philosophy’ (‘to have a distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human destiny’), and in this talk, he outlined a schematic division, or opposition, in American philosophy, or ‘mentality’, which was to have a profound influence on subsequent American attempts at cultural self-analysis ...”

“... timelessness that makes them oddly available to the poet. In another monologue here, Thwaite makes George Dennis, Consul at Benghazi and a passionate antiquarian, open with words that form a splendidly resonant though decorous conceit for the poetic process itself: Rich bronzes, figured vases, jewellery – Fruits of my labours, subterranean joys: My men sit ...”