“... a tale of flight, family separation and reunion scattered across the waters and cities of what Richard Halpern called ‘the decaying Hellenistic world’. At its core is the romance arc of a prince, Pericles (whose motto, In hac spe vivo, means ‘In this hope I live’), losing and then finding his wife and daughter: a wife seemingly buried at sea, but ...”

“... obviously recall Beaton’s more adventurous work of the 1920s and 1930s, however. In black and white, she is seated against a backdrop depicting the abbey interior; the Star of Africa diamond glows on her sceptre, and draped in all those stones and furs she looks like something (actually, like both principals at once) out of Cocteau’s La Belle et la ...”

“... having your attention, and is then often vague or crass about what to do with it. Only one piece, Richard Wilson’s 20:50, a room-sized tank of sump oil, borrows much force from the building. It is even more effective here, reflecting wood panelling, windows and the sky beyond, than it was in the collection’s former gallery in St John’s Wood, where it ...”

“... and elegant. He hated the pages of black sans serif type, punctuated with illustrations, which Richard Hollis – working with Berger and others – had produced.Beatrice Warde, advocating the kind of tailored designs which Tschichold (briefly, but brilliantly) and Schmoller produced at Penguin, said that a book, like a wine glass, should not draw ...”

“... theories of natural law’, as Honour observes, but it cannot be considered so congenial to white philanthropists’ conviction of their superiority. Brotherhood – fraternité, – soon became an explosive word. Art and literature in the last decades of the 18th century and the first of the 19th – the first part of the period that Honour explores ...”

“... in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal designers of the White City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... of Independence. Several groups found themselves excluded from the American Dream of the white, periwigged, slaveholding intelligentsia of Enlightenment Virginia. Nevertheless, greater democratisation came in the 1830s during the age of Jackson; a tragic and bloody Civil War had to be fought in the 1860s to end the peculiar institution of Southern ...”

“... had joined in its gold rushes, passed a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts and there were yellow v. white riots in San Francisco. The ‘White Australia’ policy was inspired by Chinese incursions into Australian goldfields. In South Africa, after the Boer War, Lord Milner imported fifty thousand indentured Chinese to work ...”

“... an individual will. Thus, the significances divined by Wordsworth in, say, a ruined cottage or the white doe of Rylstone or by the infant James in a Paris street scene are not merely ascribed to things or places. Rather, they are discovered also to be there already, already existent, a sort of afterglow or mark left behind by one’s ancestors. It is as if, to ...”

“... for this one. On both Hanley is accompanied by some very nice men. I’d love to meet her mate Richard, first introduced in Estates. At Solihull College they were ‘the much-talked-about, little practised coming together of north Solihull and south Solihull, a clash of the provincial titans to match Adrian Mole and Pandora’, without the romance. In and ...”

“... of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make the tactical error of ...”

“... Yosemite, and the Tuolumne meadows to the east, are mainly wild to this day. The 3000-foot steel-white wall and brow of El Capitan; the great scooped cranium of Tissa’ack (Half Dome); the planetary granite scalps of the Tuolumne domes; the pulsing, shimmering cataracts of Bridal Veil and Virgin’s Tears; the monumental columns of the sequoias and ...”

“... in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth … Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer – nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents ...”

“... a torrential thunderstorm and forgetting to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all across her white carpet, thus putting paid to any hope of research into the friars, barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the ...”