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“... to the whimsical. An instance of self-aware pseudomorphism is a gallery curated by the American painter Amy Sillman; titled ‘The Shape of Shape’, it is a mélange of 71 works, some old, some new, by 71 artists, some familiar, some not, that feature mostly abstract forms suggestive of body parts. An example of effective anachronism is the inclusion of ...”

“... only Wagner can be said to have secured an ‘ism’ (following her trip to Weimar in 1855, George Eliot referred to the ‘propaganda of Wagnerism’). The closest precedent might be Byronism, a similar conflation of radical politics, sex and celebrity that overwhelmed existing artistic divisions. By the late 1800s, Wagnerism had become a pervasive ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... have relished. There is, for instance, Roger Lonsdale, presenting with due flourish a work by the painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson the elder, and illuminating Richardson’s own little-known life (down to a new birth-year) as well as the career of his young friend Pope. Lonsdale never writes without managing to teach one something, a critical ...”

“... wit in verse. After flowery and carefully euphonious Edwardian fine writing, the paragraphs of a George Moore or of Chesterton himself with his well-turned paradoxes, Lewis’s style – expressed by the apparent lack of any – might indeed have seemed the thing. ‘The style is not, as it looks, artless, but the product of careful design, devised as the ...”

“... was a global player of sorts. Wolf placed two major agents in the US (‘Piano’ and ‘Painter’, both now dead, and unnamed here), but admits that his people never really got the hang of working in America. Greater success was achieved in recruiting US servicemen in Germany with access to signals intelligence, and in turning the CIA’s East ...”

“... he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the idea of heroic sacrifice, and the first money he earned ...”

“... all the more poignant. If you wanted an example of non-alienated labour, you looked to the poet or painter. The work of art itself could be seen as a peaceable utopian commonwealth, its various elements blended into unity without violence to their particularity. Like the good society, it combined freedom and community. The aesthetic was the last refuge of ...”

“... Taylor sums it up) ‘boyfriend a is a peer of the realm while boyfriend b is a penniless painter.’ This, Taylor writes, was ‘the war-era bohemian life in which glamour and sophistication and something very close to poverty [were] inextricably combined’. All four at some point shared a bed with Lucian Freud; at least three of them slept with ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore in ...”

“... That group was the aristocracy of English artists and intellectuals. Her great-uncle was the painter Rudolph Lehmann, friend of Robert Browning and George Eliot. Her father, R.C. Lehmann, was a well-known writer and man of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother ...”

“... form of ‘stories’. Thus it is clear that Spender was himself highly entertained by what the painter William Coldstream describes in his diary as a ‘slightly sticky’ party given by Benjamin Britten in Hallam Street. Present as well as the Coldstreams, and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears ...”

“... in a prison camp (as Márquez might have it), but sleight of hand. Myth has been killed off, the painter Sada announces, remembering that a snow-white whale appeared in the port when he was a child, only to get shot. ‘“Ready! Aim! Fire! Destroy the miracle!” That’s right. He’d shout there were no sirens left in Galicia because we’d eaten them ...”

“... a dull farmhouse. Genuine remnants of Leptis Magna were erected at Virginia Water, to please George IV. The divide between antiquity and artifice, ancient and modern, was becoming increasingly blurred. Literary Romanticism, like the Picturesque, borrowed its tone of mystery from the ramshackle ruins of Gothic religious establishments. With a bit of ...”