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“... either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does have some fresh material. ‘New documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier ...”

“... an important part of a concerted exercise in public persuasion. The same artist’s paintings of John Simpson’s ideas of how Paternoster Square would look if the latest Palladians were given control were a highly successful spoiling exercise which came very close to making people believe it was a real alternative to Arup Associates’ official scheme. An ...”

“... As even the Attorney General prosecuting him in 1831 conceded, Cobbett was ‘one of the greatest masters of the English language that ever composed it’. He was also a writer who kept the divide between politics and the personal deliberately uncertain. He fed his readers regular accounts of his life and the lessons to be drawn from it. He confided cosy ...”

“... secretly or openly. In the late 1470s a redeeming aspect to this brigandage was discerned by Sir John Fortescue, a former Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Writing on the governance of England he found occasion to compare the bravery of the English and the French. The English were obviously the braver nation, he argued, because English robbers were so ...”

“... and manual, displaying the work of luminaries (it includes prints based on drawings by ‘the best Masters’ of the day, artists such as Francis Barlow and the French academicians Charles Le Brun and Le Clerc) while framing the task as fundamentally accessible: ‘Made easier to the comprehension of Beginners than any book of this kind hitherto made ...”

“... will be different it has remained their dupe. Consequently the education it has provided for its masters has only been temporary; dogma has soon resumed its sway. Nevertheless, the electorate’s demand for prosperity above all else causes elections to be both a political limit on economics and an economic limit on politics. This varied collection of essays ...”

“... against chimney pots, or walking the apex of a rooftop, or looking down on the Tetris pattern of masters’ gardens and college quads. I discovered that All Souls has gargoyles with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed ...”

“... out that ‘Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino … have no merit other than having been the masters of Raphael and of Michelangelo.’ Such attitudes dominated the collection and display of paintings throughout most of Europe from the early part of the 16th century until the French Revolution. The works of the so-called primitives were not highly valued ...”

“... But writing was more lucrative than the provincial stage. In 1860, when she was 25, she met John Maxwell, an Irish entrepreneur who published some of her short stories in one of his many magazines, and he successfully marketed her first novel, Three Times Dead, by giving it a new title, The Trail of the Serpent. Their subsequent affair was shadowed by ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”

“... for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political argument, has fallen back upon as a last ...”

“... were becoming more, not less, like the mother country during the 18th century. The historian John Murrin has called this process a ‘feudal revival’, which produced an increasingly hierarchical social structure and a cultural identification with the Empire and its metropolis. Draper’s model fails to explain why, even after the outbreak of war, few ...”

“... Psychoanalysis, says John Kerr, is ‘in a period of institutional decline’: ‘Candidacies are down, patients are harder to come by’ and other therapeutic disciplines are clamouring for attention. The seeds of this sorry situation were sown during the six-year partnership between Freud and Jung, when ‘historical accuracy first came to be less important than ideological correctness ...”

“... gigantic versions of amorously phallic flutes’ (we shall meet the flute-sized ones in the St John Passion). Via the Greeks our multi-cultural author arrives at what he calls ‘an event presumed to exist in historical time – the Crucifixion of Christ’. Why presumed? Did it happen or not? Perhaps the query is irrelevant in a historical context ...”