“... cultural activities in Catalonia, so that art, architecture and the Catalan language had become more powerful weapons in politics than resentment about Madrid’s handling of foreign or economic policy. The architects who worked on the new apartment blocks and public buildings in Barcelona between 1880 and 1910 began to play with a dual mandate, not merely ...”

“... English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed in doing, or else he escapes its limitations altogether. So many of the ways one thinks of him are paradoxical. In an adaptation of his own phrase (from ‘Sugar Daddy’) he is a ‘passionate clown’. He is ...”

“... bought one three-thousandth of a week before the draw, which is about three and a half minutes. A more sophisticated calculation takes age into account, in which case a 75-year-old needs to buy a ticket 24 seconds before the lottery is drawn, but a 16-year-old could risk buying one an hour and ten minutes before. It is an amusing calculation, but as an ...”

“... Leaming, who attributes every quote. As it is, we must take Brady on trust, an act of faith made more uncomfortable by his habit of quelling controversy by starting sentences with ‘Actually ...’ But Brady’s larger canvas at least enables him to give even more weight – some two hundred pages – to Welles’s career ...”

“... consulting physician at the Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. ‘I have not often derived more pleasure and instruction from a book,’ Stevenson wrote to him, confessing that he felt ‘but a wreck’ and was filled with anxieties, though he believed he had been right not to go to Davos, ‘to an air charged with germs’. Already the author of vivid ...”

“... oppression.’ He was describing in his oblique way what Anatole France a century later described more brutally as ‘the majestic even-handedness of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ France’s English contemporary Lord Justice Mathew made the point in ...”

“... writes in her exhaustive biography; at the time of his death in 1970 no one in his cohort was more revered. Yet today he is largely forgotten, which is one indication of how much the terms of art have changed. Was he eclipsed by the many artists he influenced, and are they now eclipsed in turn?Born in 1905 in a tenement on the Lower East Side, Barney (as ...”

“... In the English versions, the Muirs pretty faithfully followed the Brod line – which was more or less to see Kafka as a modern Bunyan. Like all interpretations of Kafka, this one has a good deal of truth in it. One cannot read a page of Kafka without feeling that there is a strong religious sensibility at work, allied to the kind of violent honesty ...”

“... about it is all but unknowable. In the temperate zones, where the waxing and waning of the year is more noticeable than in the tropics and more gradual than near the poles, summer and winter solstices were often marked with what archaeologists like to muffle under the blanket term of ‘ritual’, but what that means, even ...”

“... person. No other writer, except possibly Alan Bennett, has set out to make us love King George more. Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was ...”

“... had just failed with liabilities of somewhat over £250,000. He wrote: ‘I was touched by nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault with anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple dignity, too, in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism.’ I have ...”

“... are urged to test a body of thought not against competing bodies of thought but against something more easily accessible – our moral intuitions. If you know that the very idea of relativity is a product of cultural decadence, you are spared the trouble of labouring through a lot of equations and then deciding whether the phenomena can be explained ...”

“... Can any profession be more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues that medicine holds special attractions for those suffering from flawed personalities ...”

“... in which Julian/Theroux is making love to his girlfriend, an African called Yomo: Yomo was even more sensual than she looked. When she and Julian made love, which was often, and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white ...”

“... from Cathcarts Hill’ (1855)PreviousNext The camera’s capacity for transformation makes us more nervous than it did the Victorians. Fenton wasn’t a war reporter, bearing false witness; he was under orders from the printsellers Agnew and Sons, who, besides betting on a market for his photographs, had also commissioned a history painting from ...”