Perfection’s Progress

E.H. Gombrich, 5 November 1981

Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 
by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny.
Yale, 376 pp., £20, March 1981, 0 300 02641 2
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... artist. No modern critic has approached this role of the antique with more tact and success than Kenneth Clark in his book The Nude, and it is a pity that this title is absent from the extensive bibliography given by the authors. It would certainly be possible to interpret the ‘rules of art’ derived from this approach as technical rules for the ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... This salary was paid out of secret service funds and routed to Taylor indirectly through Thomas Harris, the loyalist proprietor of the Covent Garden Theatre. Taylor’s job was to write pro-government pamphlets and newspaper articles, though nothing he wrote in this capacity seems to have been identified. The 1790s was a great age of political ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... ten in the pipeline (including Golden Hillock and another Trojan Horse school, Oldknow), and Harris, which has 36 academies and another four on the way. A less successful chain is E-Act, which had 31 academies in 2013. Last year, Ofsted inspected 16 of its schools and found that ‘an overwhelming proportion of pupils … were not receiving a good ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... is first uttered, half an hour in, by a senior policeman, the humane and sagacious DI Harris. The original trailer shuns the H-word, asking histrionically: ‘What crime linked an ageing hairdresser and a famous star of the theatre?’ The answer is blackmail, made so easy by anti-gay laws, and it can still come as a surprise that this, and not ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... life. Tolkien was not a man who admired much that had been written after Chaucer, but he did like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). The Hobbit, and the hobbit, fit easily into that gentle, don’t-forget-your-galoshes world.The hobbit was Bilbo Baggins, a member of a small, sturdy, rather conventional species of humanoid, with furry feet, a ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... answer them.As Javid left the sports centre, the queen arrived, accompanied by Prince William. Sue Harris, the head of the borough’s Environmental Health Department, took them round. As soon as the queen appeared in the main hall, Mrs Jafari, the dead man’s widow, let out the most chilling howl, as if the terrible fact of what had happened had suddenly ...