“... of an inner life and its drama. There is no persuasive voice in the early poems, only a grand, epigrammatic impersonality and an empty first person. The lyrics of First Poems (1951) strive for high and solemn sentiment, and seem to say that the little ‘I’ (or ‘we’) who describes large forces or laws is also subject to them. This tactic of ...”

“... that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend ...”

“... stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.’ Here, too, was David Craig, groping through a wilderness in Morvern in search of a long-abandoned hamlet; his treasure-trove the remains of eight little houses, their stones covered with ‘whiskery grey lichens’. A hundred pages on, our intrepid explorer is being driven ...”

“... And shall Trelawny die? It seems not, since David Crane’s book is the fourth life of him to have been published in the last sixty years. Yet it is an odd sort of immortality which leaves a man with someone else’s name in the title of his biography. It was Joseph Severn, the amiable artist whose kindness sweetened Keats’s last months, who referred to Trelawny as ‘Lord Byron’s jackal ...”

“... when the axe fell on Charles Stuart’s neck, was no mere romantic gesture. Rather, it declared David Norbrook’s belief that to vindicate the cultural vitality and integrity of English republicanism at its moment of flowering – a moment of high energy not only in politics but also in political thought, journalism and in literature, too – is to make a ...”

“... states of affairs currently preoccupying and bedevilling the unhappy place. However, after reading David Lamb’s The Africans these responses should be leavened with another one – despair. For this comprehensive and valuable survey of the status quo in sub-Saharan Africa is such a depressing catalogue of human iniquity that the reader experiences the same ...”

“... of scandal. If a prime minister knows full well that he or she cannot be delicately removed by Six Grand Persons and True, tapping the shoulder in Number 10 and saying, ‘Time for you to go, never glad confident morning again,’ he or she can play for time. And time allows the defensive system of patronage to be thrown into operation. But quite apart from ...”

“... saying if he had sat through the saga of Jennifer’s Ear, a deal of ruin in electioneering. The Grand Old Man was actually no slouch at the game of media manipulation. It was he, above all, who succeeded in using the new technology of his day to project his policy and his personality in the country. While other leaders rested on the reputation they had made ...”

“... have taken it all so personally, since it’s difficult to find peers for White anywhere. David Marr’s excellent and sympathetic biography confirmed White’s singularity and perhaps even his greatness, but the recent Letters, astutely edited and accompanied by acerbic and timely interpolations, reveals the Nobel laureate as a man lagging well ...”

“... world more lived in than lost: for many people, its town halls and churches, railway stations and grand hotels, suburbs and slums, still provide (if diminishingly) the setting for their existence; and for Briggs himself, life must often have seemed like a latterday parable of Smilesian endeavour triumphantly rewarded, as the Keighley Grammar School boy has ...”

“... welfare state, turned with relish to Britain’s industrial past, partly to test and refine the grand generalisations of Toynbee, the Hammonds, Clapham and Ashton, and partly to see what (if any) guidelines that past might yield for those who wished to transform the Sahara Desert of the present into the Sunset Boulevard of the future. As a result, the ...”

“... Nevertheless the Israelis have been forbearing: they are willing, in accordance with the Camp David arrangements, to consider allowing autonomy to the West Bank Arabs, and are sorry they refuse to take part in the negotiations. The apparent reasonableness of these arguments cannot conceal the fact that they result from a typical transformation of a ...”

“... two major categories of mid-19th-century American landscape painting in her second chapter – ‘Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice’. The operatic pictures (Bierstadt’s of the Rocky Mountains, Church’s of the Andes, Cole’s sequence ‘The Course of Empire’, for instance) please her less than the ‘luminist’ paintings of Heade and Fitz Hugh ...”

“... Supper at Emmaus’ (1555) ‘The Conversion of Mary Magdalene’ (1548) ‘The Anointing of David’ (1550) ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ (1573) ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ (1573-4) ‘Lucretia’ (1585) ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ (1576-78) ‘The Rape of Europa’ (1575)PreviousNext That having been said, the exhibition does contain some ...”

“... 9 million. That’s not nothing; the show has deservedly become an institution. But institutions, grand as they are, are not the same as hits, and a little repair work was obviously needed through another medium. Apparently the punters and producers didn’t expect the movie to do that well, and would have been happy with opening weekend receipts of $30 to ...”