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“... completely disorientating. As the neighbours were interviewed by the press, I recognised one of my former schoolmasters. After almost 25 years, he looked the same, according to that pickling process that seems unique to one’s old teachers. He was speaking to the cameras as one of several vox pops, but there was nothing pop about his vox: just as I ...”

“... that Anthony Blunt, retired Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, fellow of the British Academy, former director of the Courtauld Institute, and the most influential figure in the establishment of art history as an academic subject in this country had indeed, as Private Eye had intimated a week before, and as Fleet Street had long been whispering, spied for ...”

“... in North Africa’, devote so much effort over so many years to it? Can it be true, as his former pupil François Hartog insists, in his fond but astute Vidal-Naquet, historien en personne: l’homme-mémoire et le moment-mémoire (2007) – that ‘with the myth of Atlantis one comes close to the heart of what “être historien” means for ...”

“... influence and wealth. Worse still, it made him complicit with the worsening abuses of power by his former pupil, including Agrippina’s murder. When he tried to retire in 62 ad, whether through fear, compunction or the pressure of his schizophrenic existence, Nero wouldn’t let him: he was too useful as a way of legitimising the regime. Only when he was ...”

“... of Wales, but like many of his poems it does not survive. When Arthur’s death transformed his pupil’s prospects, Skelton found himself relegated to a rectorship in Norfolk. Some of his poems embed themselves in the locality: his diatribe Ware the Hawk, against a neighbouring vicar whose hawk pursued its prey into his church at Diss; and Phillip ...”

“... Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

“... Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo, were sculptors who also ran painting workshops. Verrocchio’s pupil Leonardo da Vinci was a sculptor as well as a painter (although all that remains of his three-dimensional work is the remarkable bronze of a horse and rider in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts). Michelangelo was trained by a painter, Domenico ...”

“... aesthetic example to their neighbours. The drawing-room gatherings and expensive clothes of their former lives now seemed ‘as dross’. On a January morning the following year Born wrote to her cousin that she had ‘made the floor of my room shine with extra brightness’ using ‘beeswax, turps and elbow-grease’. She was excitedly preparing for a visit ...”

“... This allows a complex interplay between strongly individuated characters; although Medea’s former pupil in the healing arts, Agameda, is out to bring down her mistress, we accept her assessment of other characters, for example of Presbon, who has ‘the gift of self-deception’, and Akamas, who compensates for his ignorance of human nature by ...”

“... crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to A.C. Benson, his ...”

“... to move on. In the early months of 1924 he took up with Gertrud Kolisch, the young sister of a former pupil, and entered the sunniest span of his career. He was invited to tour Mussolini’s Italy by the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche, and in Florence made friends with Puccini: despite the aesthetic gulf between them the two men held each other in ...”

“... the camps found it hard to speak about their loss. In Germany, the 1964 trial of Robert Mulka – former adjutant to Commandant Rudolf Höss – and 21 others for crimes committed at Auschwitz enabled a new generation to confront the past, but in Britain and the United States it was only some years later that it became possible to broach the ...”

“... and social goals of history become either unrealisable or shallow. When Francis Fukuyama, a former pupil, of de Man’s, wrote his article ‘The End of History’ amid the events of 1989, he must have been ironically aware that his mentor and his mentor’s friends had been pouring out books for a quarter of a century on another time history ...”

“... proclaimed that a new golden age had arrived with the new emperor Nero (coincidentally or not, a former pupil of his). On the other, he was a Stoic philosopher and tragedian, seeking the best way to practise virtue and emotional moderation. Star is more interested in the Stoic Seneca, though the two sides can be hard to disentangle. In both his prose ...”

“... biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after ...”