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“... multiple Newgate escapee and sometime folk hero – to more obscure figures like ‘Posture’ Clark, a Restoration contortionist who could ‘put out of joynt any Bone or Vertebra of his body’, or Dr Gaynam, a Brick Lane watchmaker with a ‘handsome though significantly rubicund face’, who dressed as a clergyman to perform bogus weddings and was ...”

“... the troubled career of the poet laureate, Dryden. In The Enemy’s Country, based on the 1986 Clark Lectures, Hill considers a number of 17th-century writers, including Dryden, Donne, Henry Wotton, Izaac Walton and Hobbes, together with Ezra Pound. The essays focus with characteristic acuity on nuances of style and tone, but Hill is concerned throughout ...”

“... that formed the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War. Its author was Alan Clark. He at least did not pretend that Generals Haig and French, unlike Privates Scargill and Heathfield, were not responsible for a million dead.)To all this invocation of high and evasive metaphor, Milne opposes one hard and fast, earthy injunction. It is, in ...”

“... if there is existential angst lurking in these seemingly serene paintings, the impression, as T.J. Clark put it, is of ‘The Birth of Tragedy redone by Renoir.’ By​ the late 1950s, Rothko found himself a successful artist. Peggy Guggenheim had shown his work and he found a reliable dealer in Sidney Janis. In a division reminiscent of the Jewish ...”

“... all – his pay went up to £312,000. Slough Estates’ remuneration committee was chaired by Sir Christopher Harding, chairman of BET, whose own remuneration committee brought him up to £540,000. Sir Christopher is now chairman of the remuneration committee at GEC, which recently decided on a remuneration package for a ...”

“... process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies. On the opening day, the conference director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools ...”

“... Christopher Butler’s survey of post-war literature, music and painting maintains a judicious critical distance from its subject. Readers who wish a more direct report from the front lines of the avant-garde should consult a new anthology, Collective Consciousness: Art Performances in the Seventies, edited by Jean Dupuy ...”

“... indeed, proved something of a false start and anti-climax to anyone who arrived there with what K. Clark (already ‘a polished hawk-god in obsidian’) called ‘the millstone of promise hung round his neck’. Sligger Urquhart, the Dean of Balliol, a famous figure memorably evoked in A Dance to the Music of Time, seems in fact to have been one of those ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate the ...”

“... Christopher Ricks’s new book makes available many of his distinguished lectures given in the Eighties and Nineties. The essays retain a sense of occasion, and of a star performance on Ricks’s part, while the book has been designed with the aggressive sobriety that signals a class act. Presumably it was the author who decreed that the title, in defiance of commercial logic, should give no clue to the contents, and who dispensed with routine enticements such as a subtitle and Preface, so that there’s no short-cut to finding what the book is about ...”

“... In 1956,​ James Sutherland, a professor of 18th-century literature, delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge on the subject of ‘English satire’. ‘In recent years,’ he announced, ‘there have been signs of an increased interest in satirical writing,’ but even he couldn’t have seen what was about to start unfolding in a year or two, on his very doorstep ...”

“... as he looks.’ In that mode of feline understatement, nothing can overtake the words of Kenneth Clark (who was all eyes), that ‘Cyril was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort of ...”

“... Mervyn Peake, living on ‘this desperate edge of now’, or the mercurial evanescence of a Jim Clark or a Joe Orton, counts for little in the scales of achievement when weighed against such elephantine stamina and titanic endurance. This book is, unashamedly, perhaps inevitably, a monument to the loneliness of the long-distance runner, rather than a paean ...”

“... and a masochist; for more than 15 years he was also one of the finest actors in America – as Clark Gable put it, ‘that faggot is a hell of an actor.’ His beauty, his drinking, his homosexuality, his failure and his unaccountable talent have all re-formed themselves as elements of the icon that stands in for Clift, a potent image of the suffering ...”

“... for years to come, while his plays began to establish social conscience at the level of style. Christopher Bigbsy, the author of this new biography, has a perfect ear for the manners and motions of Miller’s art, and he tells a gripping story of Miller’s hunt for truth. There are mysteries to bear and ironies to become invested in – all good ...”