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“... of refugees from Germany that did much to transform intellectual life in New Zealand. Her husband, Peter, worked as a statistician in the Education Department. There were also the Dronkes, the Steiners, the people who founded the chamber music society. There was Karl Popper. Mostly they were reduced to doing jobs nothing like as responsible as those they had ...”

“... waiting outside an office for a meeting to begin. A gigantic sepia photograph of the gutted Cloth Hall in Ypres forms the background; red cap-bands are the only bright colours. It is an uncommonly fine piece of official portraiture, pleasing in its lack of eloquence.The patterned woodcuts he made in the 1890s are now – have probably always been ...”

“... revolutionary wheeled in a pram – Speakers’ Corner meant more to me Than did the statue of Peter Pan. The first theatre I ever saw The inside of was the Unity; Lenin and Stalin were nursery gods And at night behind the curtain There were meetings, meetings, meetings. At nursery school (Methodist, Kingsway Hall) I ...”

“... yet to reach his apotheosis with the life peerage that validated his sobriquet, Lord Toad of Tote Hall. Confidant of Margaret Thatcher, columnist in the News of the World, professional diner-out and social climber, Wyatt spotted his opportunity. His diary would be a secret but was, from the outset, intended for publication. Its rationale was as a nice little ...”

“... is acknowledged in the exhibition by a display mounted in the National Portrait Gallery entrance hall of photographs of 48 Portraits – oil paintings of famous men, themselves taken from photographs in an encyclopedia. Richter’s photographic starting points are old and new snapshots, newspaper illustrations, advertisements and, for the more recent ...”

“... of a family history in which successive generations are debilitated by a legacy of abuse. Rodney Hall tells of a convict at large in New South Wales in 1838, caught up in larger, even more powerful cycles of captivity and exploitation, until he finds temporary sanctuary with an Aboriginal tribe and becomes ‘the very centre of their circle’. Both novels ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... this in a long extract from a debate between Hugh Stubbins, the architect of the Berlin Congress Hall, and Frei Otto, a young German architect. The hall, built in 1956-57, mainly with American money, stood close to the border with East Berlin. Its suspended roof dipped down between two inclined arches. Although it followed ...”

“... in the Sixties and Seventies. Victorian Gothic was applied to every building type from town hall and railway station to terrace house. In the current debate, fears and hopes about social and economic change – about what we build – get confused with arguments about design – how we build it. New building types of the last decade – hypermarkets and ...”

“... Parliament’. Speaking the next day at a Women’s Institute meeting in West Newton village hall, however, the queen herself appeared to suggest that she would prefer her subjects to sort this one out among themselves. If even the queen wasn’t up for it, there probably wasn’t much of a constituency, outside the Rees-Moggs, for seeking salvation via ...”

“... output as an architect was limited: a house in Bath and work on Lancaster Crown Court and Shire Hall provide the most substantial remaining evidence of his limited practice. The writings he left are, judging by the account Brian Lukacher gives of them in Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, voluminous but opaque, incoherent and ...”

“... Sickert’s Venetian pictures come after the music-hall paintings and before the Camden Town nudes and interiors. He was in the city for long periods at the turn of the last century, but even after he left, while living and working in London and Dieppe, he went on producing paintings based on things he had done and seen in Italy ...”

“... although, like a visitor in red high heels and nail varnish, it might be a bit loud in a parish hall. Arad wouldn’t be the subject of an exhibition like this one if he hadn’t also opened up territory where product design merges with gallery art.* Along the way he has had fun being original. One move is to take a design and see how it works in other ...”

“... at the Hutton Inquiry. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was numbered tickets to Westminster Hall that were in demand: two Jacobite earls and a lord were on trial there. Graphics are not what they were – no swirl of copperplate breaking into black lettering for ‘High Treason’ – but the same appetite is being served.Take the sixpenny prints of ...”

“... consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ‘almost music-hall style of speaking’, while his son greatly admired the music-hall comic Dan Leno and would sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb ...”