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“... Baudelaire on Callot, Donald Hall on Munch, Hollander on Monet and dozens more, including Richard Wilbur’s exquisitely meditative imitation of a Baroque wall fountain, a poem that sounds more like the work of art it imitates than any other I know.* The painting of Howard Hodgkin is a first-rate example of the vivid muteness that resists critical ...”

“... suggest. Some of these complexities are autobiographical. Mrs Henry Wood was born in 1814 as Ellen Price, the daughter of an affluent glove-manufacturer in Worcester. The family was cultivated and devout, endowing Ellen with the ardent Anglicanism that coloured all her work. Her grandmother was largely responsible for her early upbringing, and her closest ...”

“... caught off-guard). The roundabouts also symbolised a main source of grievance, the increase in the price of diesel.The provision of space for protest tells us how comfortable a democracy is with street politics. In the mid-1960s, the British architect Cedric Price produced a design for a Pop-Up Parliament, which would have ...”

“... happened to Mr Nixon, Dr Kissinger and General Haig after the events described in the book. The Price of Power sticks to foreign affairs, at least as far as the machinations in the Nixon White House permit, and moves more or less chronologically through the four years it covers. So we keep coming back to SALT or Chile and in each case Mr Hersh has to go ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they ...”

“... and the public was finding new gods to worship. In 1836, two Paris dailies halved their cover price by accepting advertisements. Newspaper proprietors then discovered that running novels in instalments boosted circulation and that the words ‘To be continued’ were an infallible recipe for brand loyalty. The roman feuilleton offered huge rewards to ...”

“... Japan even when that meant loading American industry with burdens it couldn’t bear: this was the price of empire. At the beginning of the decade members of a still powerful labour movement, deploying the leverage it enjoyed thanks to Vietnam War-generated full employment, went on strike in numbers not seen since the wave of strikes that followed World War ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a fancy to the other, and they became companions in want in London’s ...”

“... reconstructed iguanodon, the head of both the table and the beast was held – as of right – by Richard Owen, universally acknowledged as Britain’s premier anatomist, ‘the English Cuvier’, and arguably the foremost British ‘man of science’ of his generation. It is true that he was not, even then, entirely without detractors. Gideon Mantell, his ...”

“... a performance of ‘Go’, a dance record – a techno dance record – and solo composition by Richard ‘Moby’ Hall, created on his computer at home in New York. During its almost lyric-less six minutes and 30 seconds of fast beats, atonal bleeps and melodic keyboard lines, you hear ‘go’ shouted 37 times, ‘yeah’ 23 times, and ‘hold tight’ (I ...”

“... the street-gangs of Milo and Clodius achieve respectability by running wild. ‘As he drops the price of the roses into the old woman’s scraggy hand, half a dozen lictors dressed in dark shirts are taking up the width of the sidewalk with their excited movements.’ The Italy of Dante and the Vatican is also evoked, so that we may sympathise with Sir ...”

“... mean it couldn’t happen. The effort of dragging yourself to the polling station is a small price to pay for insuring yourself against the monumental regret you would feel if you stayed at home the one day your vote was really needed. The prospect of waking up to find yourself the person who cost Obama the presidency is so ghastly it’s worth hedging ...”

“... about being driven in this way was easy. Much discussed of late has been her second novel, The Price of Salt, the odd, nervy, yet surprisingly potent lesbian love story she managed to publish – despite crippling fears that it would destroy her reputation were its authorship to become known – under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952. Virtually ignored ...”