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“... a certain point he seems never to have spoken or responded to language again), he drew constantly, producing large, hypnotic images on brown paper bags or donated rolls of examining-table paper of the type you see in doctors’ surgeries. His characteristic subjects include arid Mexican landscapes and hills (often with train tunnels and trains ...”

“... with whom you want to spend prolonged periods of time. Reviewing Noakes’s biography, Stevie Smith observed that ‘another thing that bit upon poor Lear’s nerves when they were ageing – and bites upon ours as we read of them – are those endless travels.’ He was infuriating to himself and to others, an interminably perplexed celebrant of what he ...”

“... factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead. Religion, whatever else it involves, has an irreducible core of ...”

“... of Michael Portillo. The other candidates are unknown and rather unknowable, though Iain Duncan-Smith, the spear-carrier of Thatcherism, is not what the Conservative Party now needs. There appears, to an outsider, little ideological coherence to the contest. Clarke, a genially tolerant figure and a strong Europhile, has some surprising supporters, including ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation and ...”

“... and knife marks they found in the manuscripts – ‘hysterical mutilations’, Martha Nell Smith calls them in her study of Dickinson – might have been Austin’s doing, as Mabel told her daughter they were. In fact, they were Mabel’s work. She meant to obliterate all traces of her rival even if it required the gagging of the poet and the ...”

“... more modest than those of their neighbours and their home bordered the railroad. As a child, Evans drew and painted and often retreated to the secret worlds of books and diaries. When he was older, he took snapshots of ordinary things and put them in albums (‘Pair of pants – Hamilton, Montana – 1916’). He also became an obsessive drawer of ...”

“... to allow bitterness to linger. Two of the poem’s other translators, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, describe its ‘exquisitely subtle blend of ferocity and tenderness’. ‘Let my heart preserve me from all hate,’ the narrator intones. He also draws back from some of the more celebratory aspects of racial self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former ...”

“... in order to dispel the anthropological premise of modern economics: ‘the myth of barter’. Adam Smith supposed – as primers on economics complacently repeat – that economic life emerged from a propensity of the species to truck and barter. The Wealth of Nations imagines ‘a tribe of hunters or shepherds’ among whom producers of arrowheads, tanned ...”

“... Helmut Kohl’s election campaign drew to a close on a perfect autumn evening in the cathedral square of Mainz, capital of the Rhine Palatinate, where he had begun his political career. As night fell, the towers of the great sandstone church glowed a dusky red above the baroque market place, packed with supporters ...”

“... soul in silence.’She wasn’t always silent, and it was the situation with Katharine Loring that drew Henry down to Bournemouth. Katharine’s sister had weak lungs, and Katharine – ‘who appears to unite’, he wrote, ‘the wisdom of the serpent with the gentleness of the dove’ – was trying to look after Louisa and Alice at the same time. Alice was ...”

“... When the modern reader makes the transition from merely dreaming along with Jane Grigson or Delia Smith to trying a recipe, the imperatives resume their familiar role. But this cannot have been the case with a book such as Household Management, or not for much of the time. How did the following sentence function? ‘Send [the pancakes] to table, and continue ...”

“... York to an area even more remote than the one inhabited by his contemporary, the clergyman Sydney Smith, who complained that he was so remote from civilisation he was twenty miles from a lemon. An absence of lemons wouldn’t have bothered Stubbs, who shut himself up in a farmhouse at Hawkstow in North Lincolnshire, in what’s now Humberside, where he ...”

“... his theory of stages of social development, sketched the concepts of base and superstructure, and drew distinctions between the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production. All of this was to give his followers endless scope for argument and exegesis over the next hundred years. Sperber sees Marx’s economic ideas as rooted in a ...”