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“... Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Fernand Léger and Raoul Dufy. But she made no money, and her husband, Robert Mathias, resented, as Strouse puts it, ‘how much the Ballets Russes dancers ate, Ena’s impetuous gift of the pearl necklace to Diaghilev, the haemorrhaging red ink of the dress shop’. The couple fought bitterly, never more than over Ena’s ...”

“... night stars are jewels on black velvet; starshellsFirework all over. So, too, do tracers’Orange, green, red, blue and starch-harsh white.At 4 a.m. we’re shaken awake. By 5, it’s no longer night.Tanks crouch like toads; engines are warmed. Rank, blue smokeBurns with stagnant oil. Our tanks turn, avoiding rammingOne another in half-dark. From each stark ...”

“... pre-First World War Riviera scene, picked out in loving detail (a 1912 high-set Austin in bottle-green, the music of Massenet and Chabrier), is made doubly unreal by the imaginations of these two, which dwell a great deal on Byzantine genealogy. What their relationship really is – if, for instance, it’s anything so ordinary as homosexual – the reader ...”

“... for spiritual regeneration as much as a manifesto for environmentally-sensitive policies. For Robert Harrison, too, the Enlightenment took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of science and [its] abstraction from ...”

“... thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert Louis Stevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, a Scot who was one of Borges’s translators and with whom Borges stayed in St Andrews, mentions the ...”

“... Then morning comes, saying: ‘This was a night.’ Robert Lowell Broken knights. – No, not like that. Well, no matter. Something agreeably Tennysonian (is there Any other kind?) About ‘broken knights’. Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere. In my one-piece pyjamas – My it doesn’t matter suit, With necessarily non-matching – Matchless, makeless, makeles – Added top, I pad Downstairs to look At the green time On the digital microwave ...”

“... the getaway car after the reception, I         found my ushers gathered to decorate the green Oldsmobile         the usual way – with Just Married, pieplates, ribbons, and straw.         I was furious. I rushed forward to kick Al who padlocked         tire chains to an axle, then swung at Dan who sprayed silver ...”

“... and Macke are shown looking in the direction of Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Rousseau, Sonia and Robert Delaunay. It wasn’t so much about France as it was about making oneself modern – which, at least up until the Second World War, was impossible without France. Nationalist painters and critics attacked Marc, Macke and their followers for selling Germany ...”

“... have shown that the results more than justify the dangers of this method. At the same time, as Robert Fowler wrote in ‘Herodotus and His Contemporaries’ (1996), he had – in addition to Homer, elegiac and lyric poets and Athenian dramatists to give him patterns of narrative and characterisation – many now largely lost Ionian prose writers, mostly ...”

“... out my happenings’, Riddley is involved with the legend of St Eustace, and the Green Man with vines growing out of his mouth, and a version of a Punch and Judy show. He struggles to master the meaning of these things. They are, of course, just about as remote and mythical to us – so that our own past is evoked as much as Riddley ...”

“... mechanicals, who happen to be rehearsing a musical version of the Charlton Heston movie Soylent Green. Much of the novel consists of flashbacks from the lives of the characters, and the serendipitous intersections between them, as they all move towards a final conflict with Puck, the Beast, which is destined to take place during the first, and perhaps ...”

“... by a docile cow. It is a student painting, but a very good one; the dirty yellows and artificial green glow adhere to the scene, seeming to make sense of the dancing table and the upside-down head, a motif that became Chagall’s signature. ‘When I arrived in Paris I was the colour of a potato,’ Chagall told an interviewer in 1967, meaning that he was ...”

“... her own exertions, Mary Ward made herself one of the most famous and highly paid women of her day. Robert Elsmere was a publishing prodigy (Sutherland has called it ‘probably the most popular novel of the century’), and it was followed by books that earned an apparently interminable flow of adulation and royalties. She used her literary status to make ...”

“... first as mercenaries, for pay, and then as rebels, for land: Hervé (full name not known), Robert Crispin (or ‘Curly’) and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with ...”

“... long-standing mystery of charisma, and some people’s ability to turn a screaming red flag into a green light.Blay-Miezah spent the years after the coup running various low-level scams in West Africa and the US, apparently with no real goal other than getting to stay free of charge in fancy hotels. He posed as an executive with the African Development ...”