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“... now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of ...”

“... Renoir (unfortunately), Picasso. But sculptors have less frequently turned to painting, which may explain why many art historians have found it so difficult to believe that the Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Andrea Verrocchio (1435-88) took up painting relatively late in his career and then abandoned it on recognising the extraordinary ability of his ...”

“... speculations. A contemporary explained: ‘In engraving and its operation the process of thought may be carried on with that of the work, and neither be retarded in its progress, by one who is master of his subject in either way. Hence the wild and fanciful theories that emanate from a well stored and imaginative mind.’ Because Blake made his living ...”

“... as an occasion for otherwise elusive experience. It came to represent the modern in general, as David Welsh ably demonstrates in two immense chapters, one on utopian fantasy from the turn of the 20th century, the other on the inevitable ensuing sourness. In Anticipations (1902), H.G. Wells imagined the Metropolitan Railway’s ‘black and ...”

“... before the levee at Holyrood, when he had worn ‘full Highland dress’, described by the painter David Wilkie as kilt and hose ‘with a kind of flesh-coloured pantaloons underneath’ and by a Lowland laird as ‘the Royal Tartan Highland dress with buff-coloured trowsers like flesh to imitate his Royal knees, and little bits of Tartan stocking like other ...”

“... Thorpe’s sister, eventually committed suicide; his paternal grandfather was an archdeacon. In May 1968, Thorpe married Caroline Allpass, who died in a car crash 11 days after the 1970 general election. His second wife, Marion Stein, was a refugee from prewar Vienna who had been married to the earl of Harewood, and remained with Thorpe until her death ...”

“... the work seriously. Syberberg eschews a naturalistic or documentary style of presentation. There may be more hard facts than soft focuses in the film, but the facts are woven into images from which they are inseparable. They would not be much help in passing an exam in history or civics. In a work as full of conceit as it is of conceits, Syberberg shows an ...”

“... bars by a factor of 400 just so that the remaining uncertainties can be made visible on the page. David Weintraub’s new book, How Old Is the Universe?, captures the spirit of this post-lonely-hearts era. Weintraub, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University, offers a patient tour of the new data-rich landscape. Where Overbye had focused on the outsized ...”

“... any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who think it’s just a fluffy cover story for an ideological programme of radical Tory cuts (which is ...”

“... clandestine meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as it seems in retrospect – that he would ...”

“... to sleep right through. Our own sleep patterns are profoundly artificial and unnatural, which may be why so many of us need sleeping pills to get what we think of as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little ...”

“... justice (who isn’t?). He is also, on some accounts, a victim: his unfortunate mentor at the LSE, David Held, has described the predicament the ostensibly reform-minded Saif found himself in after his father’s people had revolted as ‘the stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He ...”

“... On 24 July, in a speech to the Rwandan parliament, David Cameron said that the old ideological divisions concerning aid and trade – aid is ‘wasteful’, trade is ‘unfair’ – needed to be abandoned in favour of a commitment to what works. He talked about the importance of transparency and accountability at both governmental and non-governmental levels to ensure that resources were used efficiently and money reached its targets ...”

“... Not even the most intransigent of the Old Guard can see any danger in Felipe Gonzalez. Spain may be a less interesting place now but it is much more prosperous. The most obvious physical change in recent years has been caused by the emergence of the foreign car as a status symbol: the streets of Madrid are clogged by rival fleets of BMW and Mercedes ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”