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“... whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is more or less Brooks’s has been bombed, ‘a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning room ...”

“... transmits Morse-encrypted information to his hero is taken from the work of the artist Cerith Wyn Evans, who has light bulbs, chandeliers and public signage do exactly that (he recently made the ‘O’ and ‘I’ of the Centrepoint sign in London flash Morse-encoded passages of Merleau-Ponty across the city). Most of all, Hall draws on William ...”

“... texts not as embodiments of moral truths but as perpetual, festive comedies of errors. Malcolm Evans’s essay on ‘Deconstructing Shakespeare’s Comedies’, which is itself highly ludic, shows how the ideas of Derrida and Bakhtin can be applied to the polysemous discourses of these ‘carnivalesque’ plays. But he is uneasily aware that current ...”

“... and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian’; ‘No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted’; Gellner’s account is ‘Weberian ...”

“... of Mantegna’s prints has long been observed, but it was first pointed out – by Godfrey Evans, in an unpublished Courtauld Institute MA Report of 1977, which Landau properly credits – that early impressions, if examined under magnification, turn out to be ‘drypoints’, not engravings, and so were made with a sharp instrument handled not unlike ...”

“... scene in North and South shows Margaret Hale flinging herself between the body of the master, John Thornton, and his striking workers, in an effort to defuse the threatening violence of the encounter. ‘What possessed me to defend that man as if he were a helpless child!’ she wonders later. The plot’s answer is that she will eventually come to love ...”

“... Actors in Britain’s overseas empire needed more than just European languages. Sir John Bowring, the fourth governor of Hong Kong, claimed to speak a hundred languages and dialects, and was certainly adept at more than thirty. Such men, you may protest, were exceptional elite figures. True enough, but there is plenty of evidence of British and ...”

“... for London hotel dinners in the 1850s. By then Sala was a devotee of a racy-sounding place called Evans’ in Covent Garden, where it was possible to get dinner at 1 a.m. after an evening at the theatre. He praised its ‘red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages sobbing hot tears of passionate fat’. In How They Dined Us in 1860 and How ...”

“... are William Gaskill’s superb revivals of The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem, John Dexter’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Coward’s Hay Fever, Stoppard’s Jumpers, Clifford Williams’s all-male As you like it, and Olivier’s own productions of Three Sisters and Juno and the Paycock. All of those, I’m sure, were Tynan’s ...”

“... as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law ...”

“... Great newspaper editors have not been the fashion in the post-war years. Some editors, like John Junor of the Sunday Express, have been long-lasting. Others, like his fellow knights Larry Lamb and David English, have been successful after their fashion, Lamb with the Sun and English with the Daily Mail. English (also a survivor) deserves credit for ...”

“... of the British press is often exhilarating. No doubt Murdoch’s treatment of her husband, Harry Evans, axed from the Times, was at the front of her mind. Even without that spur the verdict of guilty of just about everything would have been returned. Yet without a reliance on the press’s archive this would be a thinner book. Brown successfully excepts ...”

“... Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. Distinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to ...”

“... and name-dropping. Not surprisingly, Lowell was not amused. The same disapproval fills his ‘John Wain’s Letters to Five More Artists’. The target is not just the peculiarly discursive poetry Wain invented in Wildtrack and its sequel, but the poet himself, who is presented as lacking proportion in marshalling great past artists to his ...”

“... Dyer supporters, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, then war secretary, but he can find no trace of the necessary arrangements in the papers of either ‘Jix’ or ‘Worthy’, suggesting that even they felt the need to conceal what they were up to. All the same, by 1927 the Tories were back in power and ...”