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“... Variation 1: Schoenberg and the Serial Quartet’) we are brought to the near-present of the slap-wood school of composition; of Elliott Carter’s Third Quartet, which summons electronic aids not for the instruments but for the actual ears of the players; and of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth, which could fairly be nicknamed ‘the apotheosis of the ...”

“... to the school (two now teach there), and her grandchildren are currently enrolled. In the dusty, wood-panelled meeting room of the Victorian house which the school occupies, there is a notice-board covered with rules that the children draw up for themselves at weekly meetings: ‘P. not allowed rubber-band gun. Letting off stink bombs, £2 fine; spitting on ...”

“... At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked ‘like the Michelin man’ – started walking backwards in front of him and asked him if he was the devil, and then if he was happy ...”

“... camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. ‘After all,’ said Isherwood, ‘Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.’ The young man was not impressed. ‘But Hitler killed six million Jews,’ he said ...”

“... buildings bumps into any of the others.Timber frame-houses don’t so much blow down as blow over. Christopher Cochran, a conservation architect, showed me a picture of the church of St John Rangitukia which did blow over. The locals pulled it back to its feet. Now wooden props like flying buttresses prepare it for the next storm.Just as England’s Navy ...”

“... has gone unheeded, for he is back again, almost as good as new, in a parallel-text translation by Christopher Pilling. These translations are a labour of love: heroically complete, decorously literal and slightly awkward. So much depends, in Corbière, on a recklessness that expresses itself in the twisting and hammering of poetic form. Among recent ...”

“... Montjoy. Marie Mountjoy, of Silver Street, near the Barbican, ran a business with her husband, Christopher, making ‘tires’, ornamental headwear fashionable among ladies at court (‘tires’ were elaborate compounds of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the ...”

“... from some kinds of art-photograph, but from the major part of the tradition of photo-journalism. Christopher Killip’s photographs of the Isle of Man have been published by the Arts Council in a volume so beautifully printed that it is a work of craft to be admired in its own right. The pictures sit in the midst of wide white margins. The sober immobility ...”

“... cagey than ‘eloquence’ can suggest. ‘Stealthy’ is another possibility – a word Michael Wood used in introducing the collection of Frank’s essays we published to mark his 90th birthday. But as I pile on the epithets I hear Frank’s voice in my head and I stop. Last February Frank gave a lecture at the British Museum – one of three LRB ‘Winter ...”

“... private commissions, which became a testing ground for early Bauhaus techniques, was built using wood from a decommissioned warship and looked like an Alpine masonic lodge. In 1922, Gropius and Itten came into conflict. According to the Bauhaus student Paul Citroën: Itten had something demonic about him. As a master, he was either profoundly admired or, by ...”

“... a government-sponsored housing project called Nova Vida. What’s left of the houses, splintered wood and stray pieces of sheet metal, now lies scattered below the gaze of the Nova Vida condominiums, which are arranged in pink and white rows. ‘The Europeans get to live in condos while we live like this. There is no law for us,’ said Manuel Antonio, a ...”

“... reconstruction: Spufford knows that a visiting Londoner would have registered a pervasive odour of wood fires, in contrast to the sea-coal burned at home, and a relative dearth of pockmarks on New York faces. At a higher level, he takes care to underline the tightly woven nature of transatlantic elite politics – De Lancey, like Clinton a historical ...”

“... out for a stroll in Hyde Park, she embarks on an imprudent ramble through a thick, rain-lashed wood, which culminates in a shared confession that they hate mountains – at least prompting the pair to laugh at their own wretchedness. Soon enough Vita’s feet toughen up and she derives material from her surroundings for a powerful observation. As an ...”

“... has only the faintest of suggestions that we have created him or that he has answered our call. Christopher Lee, in a series of Hammer movies, was dignified and handsome, but far too natty to have come out of anyone’s unconscious. These Hammer films, incidentally, seem now to have acquired a patina of critical respectability, rather as if Sid James, with ...”

“... man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I too ...”