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“... in the last decades of the 18th century, before Wilson came to be forgotten. The portrait painter John Hoppner, an early adherent of the Joey-Barton-on-Question-Time school of cultural criticism, declared that ‘considering the qualities of Claude & Wilson as He shd. the qualities of two fine Women, He should acknowledge the beauties of Claude but say Wilson ...”

“... Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain ...”

“... impressive, but it was the only thing left to see: everything else had been looted. Forgotten Masters, an exhibition of works painted by Indian artists for East India Company officials, currently on display at the Wallace Collection (until 19 April), shows, among other things, India before the carnage of the 19th century (the word ‘loot’ comes from ...”

“... and quite implausible when arguing as he did that we fantasise if we imagine ourselves to be masters of our own discourse because as users of language we come willy-nilly under the impersonal empire of the Signifier, which makes greater or lesser hysterics of us all. According to Lacan, once conscripted into the Symbolic Order of language we no longer ...”

“... as Isadora Wing discovered that she need not worry in order to keep the plane in the air, so Tracy masters her fear of falling when falling in love. But while Jong took her inspiration from the hard-boiled egotistic journalism of Henry Miller, Dick has digested new theory to write her novel: ‘When we make love,’ she observes (without apparent ...”

“... else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official biographer, have been at fault here. While spending a lot of time with Plato and Christian Platonism, as of course they should, they have allowed Kant to languish in the dusty ...”

“... albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the populist professor of the Thatcherite tabloid press. Whatever else he has lost in the process, it is not his ironic sense of humour, and in appraising one of Disraeli’s ...”

“... hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope ...”

“... would enjoy ‘the Halcyon calms succeeding the storm’, as he put it to his old fellow-sailor John Adams. Why should the new generation not flourish? To be sure, Jefferson did not believe that we could all be entirely happy, but ‘the deity’ had kindly ‘put it in our powers’ to come quite close to it. All of us have moreover been created in such a ...”

“... Although an important aim of the exhibition was to explore the influence of the Spanish Old Masters – and their successor Goya – on modern French painting, we quickly realise that Murillo, who was by far the most admired, and much the most expensive, of the Spanish artists whose work became more available as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, did not ...”

“... staged its superb Africa exhibition in 1995. In the book that marks the opening of the galleries, John Mack warns against ‘a monolithic reinvention of African culture and history’, preferring ‘to open up a new gateway into a collection that can be mined in very many ways to show something of African varieties of life and ...”

“... available elsewhere and the sources for which are not stated. It includes a list of the Grand Masters of the Temple: for reasons they give, the authors are convinced that this list is fuller and more accurate than any hitherto known. Because they had found this list convincing, the authors turned their attention to another list which at first they had ...”

“... with a touch’) and they themselves were advertised: ‘To be SOLD. A Black Girl, the Property of John Bull, Eleven Years of Age, who is extremely handy, works at her Needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well. Enquire of Mrs Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, the Strand.’ Huge, ornate images of negroes were displayed outside ...”

“... in which a Mexican baker desperately tries without success to produce the baguettes his French masters demand. When everything fails (including trampling his dough with shoes recently dabbled in dogshit) he is run out of town by his infuriated clientele. As Valence discovers, the difficulty is not with technology but with ‘the human problems that ...”

“... narrator-hero Casaubon reflects at the end, as he awaits probable liquidation at the hands of the Masters of the Hollow World, that ‘the certainty is that there is nothing to understand.’ ‘I understood the Kingdom and was one with it,’ he continues, eating a peach and contemplating the vines where once the dinosaurs wandered about. ‘The rest is only ...”