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“... people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We want George,’ ‘We want Liz.’ I don’t believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not ...”

“... first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his ...”

“... cast into the political wilderness by the time the decade was over; two – Donogh O’Malley and George Colley – would die suddenly (there was no such sudden death among the old guard); one – Brian Lenihan – would be fired in disgrace; another, now dead, would end up sodden with drink in the European Parliament; and then there was Haughey. The ...”

“... grovel and it makes people lie. Politicians long ago realised the uses of royal circuses: Lloyd George devised a wholly bogus Investiture Ceremony for the Prince of Wales at a time when the Irish were getting out of hand, and Harold Wilson did the same in the late Sixties when Welsh and Celtic nationalism was again on the rise. Despite an enormous media ...”

“... commemorating the tourist attraction which it was also to become. The third narrative tells how George Meredith modelled for the corpse in the painting and how his wife then ran away with the painter (see also the sonnets in Modern Love). The three tales are deftly assembled and get on very well together. Chatterton is ...”

“... ever transcribed, ‘I Know Moonlight’; American pop ballads of the period by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin; traditional English ballads, French popular songs, and even an Italian folksong, ‘Donna lombarda’, a consequence of the friendship with Virgil Thomson, who collected such materials. Likewise, there are quotations from ...”

“... fourteen when he arrived in London from Everton, Lancashire in 1753. He came to be apprenticed to George Keith, a bookseller in Gracechurch Street in the City. This was Hogarth’s London, a scene of dirty streets and dark alleys in which impressionable young people were met off the coach by an expectant crowd of brothel keepers, cutpurses and card ...”

“... a constant flow of adrenaline, taxis, drinks, an opening at the Museum of Modern Art, a party at a painter’s loft, poems written on the run between the San Remo bar and the New York City Ballet.’ To show what makes O’Hara more than just a diarist of a particularly fertile Bohemia would be to show how his poems work, why they sound as they do. Marjorie ...”

“... had been treated unjustly. She had sailed from England in July 1838, following her marriage to George Maclean, a military officer stationed in the Gold Coast, whom she married, her friends believed, mainly to escape the scandalous rumours which increasingly surrounded her. From 1825 or 1826 until her departure in 1838, tales circulated of her supposed ...”

“... darker comedy out of a related exchange, in which a Daisy Miller-like heroine who aspires to be a painter tours a Roman gallery with a successful writer and art critic, while dismissing in succession the merits of a Raphael double portrait, a Sebastian del Piombo, a Velázquez, two Claude Lorrains and a Memling. In that story, the writer finally proposes ...”

“... John Jeffries, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in ...”

“... Made’ (a reference to the weaselly ‘past exonerative’ tense popularised by Richard Perle and George W. Bush among others), which fits the scheme, but doesn’t wholly convince. Franzen has gone for the thematically resonant joke at the expense of the character. Would Patty really title her cri de coeur, which doesn’t attempt in any way to dodge ...”

“... as if she too was plugged into the ‘immense réservoir d’électricité’ described in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. ‘The main duty of the poet,’ Tonks declared, ‘is to excite – to send the senses reeling,’ but hyper-receptivity often seems like a cross she had to bear. In one of her poems, she is a ‘zoophyte’ ‘sponging up ...”

“... her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor ...”

“... the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an irresistible ...”