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“... It was stamped deeply upon ‘modern memory’ – not just in literary culture as described by Paul Fussell, but in family and communal memories and in the most solemn national commemorations. Consequently the Great War is unusual in being a matter of both intensive academic study and considerable popular interest. More readily than on many other ...”

“... his resemblance to Gary Cooper: but only the occasional small paragraph to indicate that the man under discussion was America’s most innovative young dramatist since the late Sixties, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and certainly hadn’t said goodbye to writing yet. I would like to think Shepard had some control over the two photographs that made ...”

“... be turned quickly. Little flecks broke off. I opened it at random to 1 Corinthians 10, a letter of Paul’s about idolatry. The letter spoke of people who wandered in the wilderness eating ‘pneumatic’ bread and drinking from a ‘pneumatic’ rock – or so I was translating it in my head, the word for ‘spiritual’ being pneumatikos in Greek, from ...”

“... He’s my enemy,’ Jane Auer recalled telling a friend when she first met Paul Bowles. But she immediately followed him to Mexico even so and, though she had been and would always be much more drawn to women, married him less than a year later. The instinct to court an ‘enemy’ rather than an admirer may have been a shrewd one: it seems to have been especially difficult for Bowles’s admirers to do her justice ...”

“... and setting for Higonnet’s study. She focuses on three women: Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, who became Joséphine Bonaparte; Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard, nicknamed Juliette and later famous as Madame Récamier; and Juana María Ignacia Cabarrus y Galabert, who went by the name of Térézia Tallien and was known popularly as ...”

“... his assessment of his contemporaries, ‘Art Now’ (1933), has been long out of print. Neither man cuts the figure he once did and nothing in the Pallant House show would seem to justify Read’s judgment. Its main revelation is the reconstruction of the moment in which it could be made. ‘Window, Finsbury Park’ (1933) Born in 1908, Pasmore ...”

“... premature revenants. The hoop-backed old woman with the doll-child in an ancient pram. The naked man wrapped in his inadequate eiderdown. The teetering albino-blonde lady in cylindrical black, regular as a tramcar in her solipsistic excursions; remarkable in that she doesn’t have an accompanying pet, just the feeling that one is missing, that she ...”

“... a book that Pritchett would review, so I lingered and asked him about his travels. He was a happy man, having just published the second volume of his autobiography to great praise. He wrote diligently and published often. Even so, he still needed his spells of teaching in America to stay solvent on Regent’s Park Terrace.One thing about living in Catford, I ...”

“... Dr Paul-Michel Foucault, a wealthy and conservative surgeon, is deeply irritated by his young son’s evident disinclination to follow him into medicine and apparently infuriated by his effete strain of bookishness. He decides to toughen the boy up by introducing him to the bracing and heroic virilities a surgeon habitually displays ...”

“... observes. Some of the best excerpts are from Charles Péguy: from the Vers libre of Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and from his attack on the ‘socialist art’ advocated by Jaurès. Modernism, well under way before it, as is testified not only in the work of such big names as Trakl and Apollinaire, taken ...”

“... Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation ...”

“... took pains over the curvature of labels, the lettering, the spacing, the gold centres, the fleur-de-lys motifs across the bottom. Apart from their names – ‘BLACK BEAN’, ‘TURKEY VEGETABLE’, ‘PEPPER POT’ – the cans are uniform: one for each variety of Campbell’s soup available at the time. In 1962 the paintings looked mass-produced – that ...”

“... her head inverted, sits by a table on which stand a samovar and three teacups, while a faceless man makes for the door, which leads to a burning red moonlit scene; the room is otherwise occupied by a docile cow. It is a student painting, but a very good one; the dirty yellows and artificial green glow adhere to the scene, seeming to make sense of the ...”

“... noted that Poussin had the ‘most prized gifts of intelligence’. A few years later, the Comte de Brienne said of him that he ‘was endowed with a great deal of reason and a fine mind, a lively and strong imagination, a very accurate memory and very sound judgment, coupled with natural good sense’. By the end of the 18th century the artist had picked up ...”

“... The​ old man told my French nephew that he had something special to show him. Something he had thought best to keep in a drawer since 1943. In that village, families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon ...”