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“... in the context of his avowed admiration of Cézanne, to be a betrayal not an advance. In 1952 Christopher Isherwood gave E. M. Forster two bottles of claret and a painting by Vaughan. His work made an ideal gay to gay present; the male nude, or nude in landscape were his main, almost his only subjects, and the steady sale of his smaller works seems to ...”

“... that we attend PT wearing all our ‘kit’, except blankets. (I will never call a child of mine Christopher.) The same letter gives, incidentally, a clear view of the left-wing political position that Reed, for all his aristocratic fantasies, was never to abandon: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘a good deal from Russia, of course, but rather joylessly: the ...”

“... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and ...”

“... the Wild West’, Dylan’s Christian conversion, and his appearance as ‘Jewish Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able ...”

“... himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying the critical principles which Ricks enunciated in a recent consideration of Empson’s work. Ricks praised his critical master in this journal for speaking ‘with the direct personal commitment ...”

“... society. Densely populated with characters major and minor, and echoing with the table-talk at White’s and the Turf, the Colville diaries are a unique record of a governing class still functioning with superb aplomb in the midst of the People’s War. To Colville, the small world of the pre-war ruling circle was home, and he wrote in his diaries as ...”

“... 11. Isherwood and Don come for dinner. 15. Dinner with Gerald [Heard]. 16. Lunch with Christopher Isherwood and Don at MGM Studios. 17. Bob [Craft] records Gesualdo 2 to 5. 19. Aaron Copland for dinner. 22. Bob records. 24. For dinner here: Isherwood and Don. 29. Lunch at Bel Air. The whole day with Robert Graff (NBC Television): I am going ...”

“... names and lived to the age of 99. Another who tangled with Bolsheviks, defeating a plot to seize a White Russian submarine and kill its officers, including himself, was Wilfred Dunderdale, better known for his part in smuggling the Enigma encoding machine from Poland in Hitler’s war. In later years, since he disliked the Whitehall atmosphere of MI6, this ...”

“... drunk at the same fountains long before,’ Leigh Fermor explains. In Classics Transformed (1998), Christopher Stray reveals (citing a letter from Leigh Fermor) that they went on to discuss heatedly their rival pronunciations of Latin. That shared culture may actually be dead, and that story’s significance may live on only in the eye of sentiment, but I feel ...”

“... who produced masterpieces of late 16th-century Catholic piety were drunkards: the publisher Christopher Plantin told a Spanish client that the brothers only worked long enough to accumulate sufficient funds to vanish into Antwerp’s taverns, from where Plantin, who depended on their remarkable talents, would extract them, pay their bills and retrieve ...”

“... and not the real deal. Culture of Complaint may prove to be the most influential such screed since Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Hughes is much funnier than Lasch, and probably happier – his strings of metaphor are evidence that the author enjoys his work. Nimble yet lunkish, his sense of humour favours sarcasm and the well-turned ...”

“... I to Henrietta Maria. In a recent essay (published in Past and Present, November 1983) Peter White has thrown the Tyacke thesis into question. He contends (as H.C. Porter has long done) that the pre-Laudian Church was never narrowly Calvinist. Yet at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on ...”

“... fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as being more dangerous than the imperial authorities in London. Such clashes but also collaborations between different peoples are surely what make imperial history (and we ideally need another name for it) such a compelling and ...”

“... and Bob, a long-distance lorry driver. (All names except Bob’s are pseudonyms.) But all are white (hardly a given in this period) and the age range is narrower. All were born in the 1920s or 1930s, married in the 1950s or 1960s, and were near or into retirement when they began writing for Mass Observation in the 1980s (the most recent entries are from ...”

“... movement, favouring medieval typefaces, elaborate woodcut illustrations, uncut pages and plenty of white space. An equivalent international vogue for ‘ephemeral bibelots’ was inspired by the Montmartre-based Chat noir. In America, slim productions with names like the Fad, Impressions, A Little Spasm and Whims promoted a Wildean cult of decadence, and were ...”