“... Even the backgrounds are classed. Seated Woman in Blue seems to have strayed into a fairytale wood (maybe the forms on the left are rocks in an abandoned quarry Cézanne was fond of). The big bad wolf is not far away. It is in general a special moment to be looking at Cézanne’s portraits, because after a century and more it becomes clear that the ...”

“... story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town, is currently lived in by the photographer Antony Crolla though many of my belongings are still there. This afternoon I go round to start the lengthy process of clearing out some of the books and papers so that it can be used for the filming.I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same ...”

“... for this high office. The short answer is that he had made a great impression with The Sacred Wood and The Waste Land, and had achieved a small but choice audience as editor of the Criterion. The newly established English Faculty at Cambridge, and especially I.A. Richards, had taken him up, and Middleton Murry, his predecessor in the lectureship and still ...”

“... all my gay comparisons aside’ (clearly parallel to ‘lay his gay comparisons apart’ in Antony and Cleopatra) had been ‘inserted by Theobald to give a colour to the imposition that he meant to put upon the publick’; another parallel was deemed ‘an interpolation of Theobald’s to countenance his fraud’. But Malone found reason to change his ...”

“... languid phone calls were often to do with professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the ...”

“... and approachable. To most others, he was austere and somewhat intimidating. The composer Antony Hopkins thought him ‘a dark horse’, withdrawn and laconic; the younger poet and apprentice producer, Anthony Thwaite, remembered sharing an office with MacNeice in the late Fifties, when he was drinking heavily, as a far from comfortable ...”

“... theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with Antony making love to Cleopatra, his head up her skirts. Cunnilingus served cold, as it were, was quite hard for a Stratford audience to take and in the Barbican ...”

“... bit floridly, shows the ‘foundation’ being undermined by ease and the erotic: I grew idle as Antony unbuckling the leonine light from one shoulder. I wanted no empire, laurel, no palm, but yours. The poet’s defiantly Afro opponents are un likely to be placated, since The Arkansas Testament continues to accommodate the view of those who follow Brodsky ...”

“... and perfumed flavour is one of the characteristic tastes of South India. Anjilly is still the wood of choice for the boat builders of Kerala – the shipyards which turned out large seafaring ships are now few, but the traditional skills are still deployed building the wonderful ‘snake boats’ which race on the rivers with crews of a hundred ...”

“... that suspicious sewing needle on the floor, the Passionists saw eloquent wounds. In Julius Caesar, Antony promises to ‘put a tongue in every wound of Caesar’. Father Germano undertook a similar duty for Gemma. Meanwhile, his advice to the people around her was to keep her busy – plenty of manual labour – and away from doctors. Catholic doctors could be ...”

“... successful, then the representative claim of the state of Israel would be greatly expanded. As Antony Lerman put it in the Guardian, ifthe National Library claims the legacy of Kafka for the Jewish state, it, and institutions like it in Israel, can lay claim to practically any pre-Holocaust synagogue, artwork, manuscript or valuable ritual object extant in ...”

“... out as a chapel. It’s delightful, box pews arranged almost haphazardly round the pulpit, the wood pale and worn. Every detail is perfect – the candleholders, the pulley that lowers the wrought-iron chandelier – with the central pillar of the chapel a ship’s mast. It’s an enchanting place, which we’re shown round by a neighbour who is one of the ...”