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“... aim at beauty – savage tribes and punk rockers can have other objectives. I agree with Kenneth Clark that there is remarkable consistency in standards of beauty throughout Western history (no, since you ask, I don’t actually think Rubens was trying to paint beautiful women). Our culture tends to be unkind in its judgments of those whose ...”

“... about that. They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and Sixties’. This ...”

“... There are younger, more fashionable artists, ready to depict a new war for a new generation; Kenneth Clark (who looks ‘taller and broader-shouldered than he actually is – it’s amazing what a first-rate tailor can achieve’) makes a cameo appearance as general fixer and taste-adjudicator. Clark invites ...”

“... Among those here castigated for snobbery and irrationality are Jeanette Winterson, Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark. The last-named is treated with particular severity because he had such power to impose his false opinions on the world. For example, he had much influence on the decision, in 1939, to store the paintings from the National Gallery in Welsh ...”

“... The more persuasive view – that feeling and expression are interdependent – was put by Kenneth Clark when he suggested that while an art without iconography does indeed fail to find a shape for the beliefs of a society, a satisfactory iconography actually modifies those beliefs: ‘The points of dogma for which no satisfactory image can be ...”

“... philosophising and artistic sophistication. When, in his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark asked himself, ‘What is civilisation?’, the answer was: ‘I don’t know … But I think that I can recognise it when I see it.’ What Clark recognised was very much the ‘Western ...”

“... the eleven-plus and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944 when I left to go to ...”

“... World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of this piece – a piece executed with great ...”

“... ends meet. Betjeman’s bumbling, bluffing exterior and his sterling war work as assistant to Sir Kenneth Clark at the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, and then as a press attaché to Sir John Maffey, the senior British diplomat in Ireland, where he was possibly a spy for the British Government. The poems tossed off on the back of ...”

“... street-canvas. It’s a two-horse race ... Also in there, loathsomely conspiring, was little Kenneth Clarke. I’ve got £700,000 in my Abbey National Crazy-High Interest account. But what’s the use? Ash, ash, all is ash. Willie said that Nigel Wicks will be (sic) very good ... is very good ... BUT – a marvellous Willyism. Everyone says Wicks is ...”

“... Do I digress? Well I digress. Art has its historian in every century. From Benvenuto Cellini to Kenneth Clark, we learn the most from their personal memories, experiences, opinions. Do I claim to sit with the Masters? Yes, I do. His conflation of the historian’s mastery of ideas with an artist’s mastery of his craft is typical. But it would be a ...”

“... starl. No sense of starl.’ He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more ...”

“... galleries. Freud had an idea of what he could do, but knew he needed a year to concentrate on it. Kenneth Clark, to whom he appealed for help, happened then to be selling some of his collection, and cheques came to Freud from Partridge’s and another West End art dealer. As a gesture of thanks Freud gave Clark a small ...”

“... of the First World War rather than that of the one that was currently taking place. His advice to Kenneth Clark on the subject is eloquent: ‘I like the Air Force: it is so horrible that no one has thought of going into it. I advise you to consider it. We are both too old to fly.’ His ‘bit’, when it presented itself, was the post of press attaché ...”