“... critics, like Maurice Morgann in 1777 with his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. A cheerful legally-minded diplomatist and civil servant, Morgann did what I suppose no good judge or defence counsel should do: he first fell for the plaintiff – fell virtually in love with him indeed – and then undertook to defend him in court ...”

“... told you his heart bled for his country ‘felt no uneasy sensation’. Bards in heroic households took their function as a matter of course, not as one of personal feeling; and though England before the war was far from heroic, Barker borrowed the proper visionary accents, seeing the ghosts of Blake and others, crying out from the past. Alone on the dark ...”

“... enhanced. McDowell’s peacocks are frequently dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, from Don John of Austria to the ‘tartan cowboy’, and he understates the sexual electricity of the uncoloured Victorian period – of the black and grey peacocks of the high 19th century. He prefers to think about cavalry officers and suggests that their bright colours ...”

“... and Fifties, which crammed the poet’s memory circuits, was receding into history as A Furnace took shape in his notebooks. That sense of living through a period of change was formative as well as enabling. Fisher’s Modernist allegiances have generally made his work more spatial than historical in reach, but A Furnace makes room in its spiralling ...”

“... who win Mastermind. Now his own long-heralded account of his experiences has been published. John Stalker had been Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police for only two months when he was asked to conduct an investigation into matters arising out of three incidents in Northern Ireland, where Royal Ulster Constabulary officers had shot and ...”

“... subjects might as well have stuck their heads through a hole in a pre-painted background. But as John Brewer emphasises in his catalogue essay, the Tour was more socially mixed than it might appear. Basset, the biggest spender among the consigners to the Westmorland, was not an aristocrat but the beneficiary of a recent family fortune made from Cornish ...”

“... tricks of scale, luminosity and outline to make his sitters loom large within their frames. He took his cue from the Dutch followers of Caravaggio – the so-called Utrecht Caravaggisti, such as Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen – who lent presence to their figures through dramatic use of light and shade. The turbaned man’s features are ...”

“... work, when he was making figure paintings against both socialist realism and abstraction. His work took on a mannered look, deliberately laboured and ugly, unnaturalistic, deformed and morally ambiguous. Die Große Nacht im Eimer, a painting of a grim stunted figure who appears to be masturbating, caused a scandal when it was shown at the Werner & Katze ...”

“... Brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ (1736) ‘Hannah Osborne, Daughter of John Ranby’ (c.1747-50) detail of ‘Captain Thomas Coram’ (1740)PreviousNext In a thoughtful essay Lamb himself attacked the notion that what is most Hogarthian about Hogarth is what is most broadly comic, most boisterous, most fun. This, he claims, is ...”

“... because the tensions and problems are simply too great for anyone. This is in part the theme of John Morrison’s efficient and often thoughtful biography, which sets out to show that, contrary to the view held (at least until recently) by many observers and politicians in the West, Yeltsin is ‘squarely in the democrats’ camp’. He reminds us that, as ...”

“... play with his thoughts and personality. Dorothy began to keep a journal at Racedown, but she took it up again at Dove Cottage after William and his brother John had gone off on a visit, leaving her alone a few days. ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return and I set about keeping my ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... to day activities of his political career. Every now and then, Disraeli opened this storehouse, took out a handful of ideas and tested them as creatures of fiction or as deft phrases for a speech. After carefully perfecting and polishing them, Disraeli put the ideas back in the cupboard for another day. This authorises a blanket dismissal of the ...”

“... an apparatchik to get on without them. These were rituals in which everyone, without exception, took part. Vaksberg, though a Gorbachev admirer, retells a story which went the rounds of Moscow at the beginning of 1989, to the effect that an edition of the popular investigative programme Vzglad had been banned because it showed an interview with Galina ...”

“... to dictatorial means to carry through its will: these, under Stalin, became routinised and took precedence over, then finally snuffed out, most of the vestiges of political life. By the end of the Terror, McAuley argues, the dominance of the Party had been replaced by that of the NKVD – and ‘the dislocation created by the system of terror was so ...”