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“... ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of Ruskin and Morris: the Ruskin who could write of a little girl he saw in ill-fitting hand-me-downs when he was lecturing in Oxford that ‘nothing spoken about art’ could be ‘of the least use’ to anyone in his audience. ‘For their primary business, and mine, was ...”

“... In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other ...”

“... of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced. In May 1983 he declared that Fairfield Porter ‘is going to have to be recognised as one of the classics of our ...”

“... six shillings each. She never asked to meet him. She wanted only to listen and to be listened to. Charles Wheeler was still overseas, and Shaw saw himself, or pretended to, as a senile version of the ‘Sunday husband’ he had been, in the 1890s. to May Morris. In 1945, however, ...”

“... was depicted by Bosch or Zurbarán with orgasmic sadism. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris note in Standard Operating Procedure, Christian iconography places at its centre an implement of torture and, in the stigmata, offers an all too human scourge with which to flay flesh raw. Of course, millions of Christians and infidels have proved unable ...”

“... Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton dared his fellow delegate Gouverneur Morris to clap General Washington on the shoulder and offer him a hearty greeting. It’s easy to imagine the response of President Bush to such an approach: Morris would have received a warm embrace, or perhaps a punch to the ...”

“... ever changed the fibres of his character.’ Through all the ups and downs of fortune recounted in Charles Hobday’s biography, the essential stuff of the man remains the same. Rickword was born in Colchester in 1898, the son of the town’s first borough librarian, who was also a local historian. Edgell’s background was thus in a petit bourgeois family of ...”

“... a sneer. A person who worries about the end of civilisation and finds time to deride Ruskin and Morris as ‘the original champagne socialists’ may not have noticed the extent of the ruins all about him. Hensher is a reliable guide to the teaching of handwriting, which he picks up in the mid-19th century with the spread of copperplate in the US ...”

“... died in Berne, where he had sought medical treatment, a few months later. Bakr Sidqi, whom Jan Morris called ‘a Kurdish Goering’, was himself murdered in Mosul in 1937. Mosul’s reputation for violence, however, was at an early stage. Its most awful hour came in March 1959, a year after the revolution that deposed Feisal’s grandson, 23-year-old ...”

“... too, that we will find. That is a kind of primitive instinct within us.’ (According to Benny Morris, writing in 2003, about a dozen cases of rape were reported during the war, but ‘they are just the tip of the iceberg.’) One of Avnery’s fellow soldiers regrets that the appearance of a British patrol stopped him from raping an Arab girl. His ...”

“... origins, but they also point forward. It’s impossible to look at this fabric without thinking of Morris or Voysey, or even art nouveau. Those drawn-out, tapering lines resemble the handles of a piece of silverwork by Charles Ashbee. Objects like this chasuble were central to the story of the Arts and Crafts movement and of ...”

“... periodicals like the Yellow Book, the Chameleon and the Savoy took inspiration from William Morris, Charles Ricketts and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, favouring medieval typefaces, elaborate woodcut illustrations, uncut pages and plenty of white space. An equivalent international vogue for ...”

“... at a Rauschenberg, however huge. It is almost as if the younger gallery-goer had already digested Charles Harrison’s salutary and illuminating study of the theory and practice of Modernist art in England, with its detailed clinical case-histories of groups and individuals. Sniffing its moment, this book appears as the tide moves against the uncritical ...”

“... was a reasonable expectation that she would find her place in Poets’ Corner, near the grave of Charles Dickens and the bust of Thackeray. Why has it taken a century to bring this about? In giving notice of her death her husband, John Walter Cross, who had married her in St George’s, Hanover Square, scarcely eight months before, alluded to her wish to be ...”