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“... in one of many moments that reveal them as more sympathetic and imaginative than Jim painted them, took him away and sent him to school in France. He came back from Caen for the holidays via Paris, where he stayed with his glamorous Aunt Maud, an artist, and her husband, an art historian. They ‘redeemed Jim’s childhood’, taking him around the ...”

“... on its spindly undercarriage. It was quicker on the ground than other airliners, just as it took off and landed faster than them. In all its movements, Trubshaw and his colleagues and their French counterparts had learned to expect an element of hurtle, exhilarating to master. Events came at a Concorde pilot at a more adrenalised tempo. Trubshaw liked ...”

“... gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a small Catholic community at the eye of the storm. At the academic level, the heightened interest in Irish history in England has found a focus in the dynamic ...”

“... began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the teaching profession by announcing an immediate review of the Statutory Order for English. No sooner had the review been announced than Mr Patten and his fellow ministers did their best to pre-empt its outcome. They let it be known that ...”

“... the most written about poet of our time – over three thousand items, Pierre Joris reckons. John Felstiner’s book is of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Celan with understanding. It provides a sort of triple deal, giving a rudimentary narrative of the life, and combining this with translations and brilliant readings of maybe four or five ...”

“... know any other.’ He was not much good at sharing either, as Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, John Houseman and others discovered to their cost. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson,’ Joan Fontaine, his co-star in Jane Eyre, remembers. James G. Stewart, the veteran dubbing mixer on Citizen Kane, describes what it was like to work with ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... to the west. Dalrymple’s exasperation found an outlet in two public letters he wrote against John Hawkesworth, Cook’s editor; and of Cook himself, he observed: ‘I cannot admit of a Pope in Geography or Navigation.’ Williams takes these passions seriously because in them he detects the source of Cook’s odd behaviour before his death in Hawaii. It ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... one suspects, very much worse than death in the mind of the ageing Eurosceptic Tory. We know who John Gielgud was – the greatest English speaker of his generation, the lyre of English verse – but his letters tell a story of who he was underneath all that, or perhaps because of being all that. At 23, we find him writing to his mother from Newcastle about ...”

“... and its marks, positing emptiness as more interesting than presence. Twombly was best friends with John Cage, the composer of 4’33” and other ego-emptying artworks. As Cage put it, ‘something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.’ What Cage did was to introduce chance operations into his work. What Twombly did was to find his way ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The ...”

“... sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’, Bulwer Lytton pronounced: ‘You have ...”

“... are quite explicit about sex. There is a good deal of masturbation, a dress stained with semen (John Gilbert’s), lesbian couplings, Stokowski failing to make it, Churchill groping and salivating on the Onassis yacht, and a total disavowal of the famous interlude with Cecil Beaton. If Gronowicz’s transcriptions are to be believed, Greta Garbo kept no ...”

“... Press. Girodias is one of the major characters in Campbell’s story, and the major character of John de St Jorre’s preposterously indulgent narrative of what he calls ‘the erotic voyage of the Olympia Press’. Girodias was a publisher not only of the forbidden avant garde, but also of pornography. The Merlin boys got into the act, forming a kind of ...”