“... to speak directly of the times we live in. ‘The Watering Place’ after Peter Paul Rubens by John Browne (1770) There is, however, nothing irrelevant about the new show at the Royal Academy, featuring Gainsborough, Constable and Turner; not because of anything it has to say about ‘the making of landscape’, but because it is so evidently a show for ...”

“... A year or so before his death in 1788, Thomas Gainsborough made a series of chalk sketches of ‘a poor smith worn out by labour’. In some of them, the smith appears as a woodman, carrying or sitting upon a bundle of faggots; and though woodmen appear in a large number of his drawings and paintings from the 1750s onwards, these particular sketches seem originally to have been made in preparation for what he was to regard as his greatest picture, ‘The Woodman’, executed in 1787 and destroyed by fire in 1810 ...”

“... become the world’s first trillionaire. That means he will be worth a thousand billionaires. As John Allen Paulos demonstrated in his book Innumeracy, most of us have a poor grasp of what numbers on this scale mean; so take a second to guess, intuitively, what you think the difference in time is between a million seconds and a billion seconds. Ready? A ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... she ends up in her old job as barmaid at the Midnight Bell. It is instructive to compare John Updike’s literary persona with that of Hamilton, for in many ways they have almost exactly the same kind of talents. Both are experts in the area where social comedy abuts on the most precise instinct for what a society is like, and what details and ...”

“... to have cost £80,000: the Whig spent £30,000 and still lost. The burden could be crippling. John Benett, MP for Wiltshire, was told by his brother in 1820: ‘The failure of the subscriptions at both the last elections has already thrown an overwhelming debt upon your property, and one that you will never see cleared as long as you live.’ And all for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them ‘immediately’. In this Arthur C. Clarke scenario, the reader will sit in his/her study in John O’ Groats, log onto the BLOC, order by keyboard a selection of the 141 items on ‘Shakespeare, William: Hamlet’, and hey-presto have them delivered at a super-fast baud rate to his/her PC. That is the Science Fiction version. The Real World ...”

“... wonders what an editor not privy to Lawrence’s situation as he was writing made of all this. As John Worthen justly observes, ‘it is hard to imagine Lawrence writing like this before meeting Frieda or hearing Frieda talk.’ It is also hard to imagine any biographer telling the tale with more dispassionate sympathy and insight than Worthen does: his ...”

“... of human beings were those of independence and equality, that the human species was at first, as John Locke put it, the ‘great and natural community of mankind’, was accepted in some form by virtually every natural-law thinker. But no other natural-law thinker of whom I am aware seriously supposed that this community could be fully reconstituted, even on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the ...”

“... to engage intelligently with Titus Andronicus – handled so well by Michael Hattaway – King John, or indeed any of the plays which made Shakespeare’s reputation in Elizabethan London. And she does not know where to begin with Cymbeline. Yet her contempt for Shakespeare’s non-naturalism remains unwavering. ‘Rumour painted full of tongues’ and ...”

“... the Obscure resembles Dickensian black comedy turned absurdist, the epitaphic aspirations of a John Chivery in Little Dorrit chilled to the bone, then the receding acknowledgment of Hades-bound presences in the narrative coda of The Newcomes provides the textual obverse of Amy Dorrit’s confidence in closural inscription, which seems for her the ...”

“... 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 resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he comes ...”