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“... Garrick’s bedroom furniture and her dress side by side; to have Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Gothickery as well as his limewood neck cloth (carved by Grinling Gibbons, and worn at least once as a joke) and his coin and medal cabinet, inlaid with wood and decorated with little ivories; to have the 17th-century samplers and embroideries made by Martha ...”

“... show not only the objects he collected, but also the rooms in his house in Denbigh Road, Notting Hill where he had installed them. There are pieces – like the biggest of the Roman portrait heads – which had been with him for decades. Others, like some of the Indian sculptures, were bought over the last few years. The modern work, much of it gifts from ...”

“... pig for a modernising monarchy. The first heir to the throne to go to prep school, he arrived at Hill House in London in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Sent later to board at Gordonstoun he was beaten up, despite being the only pupil with a personal bodyguard, and so it went on. The focal point of the royal family’s experiments in adaptation, he began life ...”

“... pictures, there is no fun in it. Same with snapshots. The van and the red signs and Orvieto on the hill behind please me very much. They please me because they are not well organised. But the verticals, the way the shadows fall, the two figures – in the end these add up to something interesting. What differentiates painters of views is the views they ...”

“... there were also pseudo clues, leading down blind alleys, pointing away from the truth. The Road Hill House case of 1860, like The Moonstone (1868), which was partly inspired by it, entailed countless clues and pseudo clues. It was one of the nastiest murders of the day, provoking national hysteria and press speculation which rumbled on for years ...”

“... he and Romana kept an open house where George Harrison first met Ravi Shankar and the actor Peter Eyre remembered seeing Barbra Streisand talking to Jonathan Miller, who liked to ‘arse around’ doing sketches while McEwen played. The party carried on later in Scotland, where on his brother’s death McEwen bought Bardrochat, the other family ...”

“... a grand social vision of planned cities drawing distant inspiration from nice places (Italian hill towns, 18th-century spas) which had escaped the vivid, dismal chaos brought about by modern transport and industry. That chaos is now more often acknowledged than challenged by architects. The self-generated complexity of cities strains the infrastructure of ...”

“... grape vine. You can see the planting she’s done here in London in front of houses in any hill town in Tuscany. Cheek by jowl, each in a piece of land not more than twenty feet by forty, are wilderness, cultivated informality and disciplined horticulture. All make pictures, two by intention, one through neglect.The desire to make landscape pictures is ...”

“... In​ her new book, Rosemary Hill characterises the achievements of more than thirty antiquaries of the late 18th and early 19th century whose records of mysterious inscriptions, stone circles, monastic chronicles and ruined abbeys, and whose collections of rusty weaponry, stained glass and old ballads, provided new ways by which the past could be recovered – and also, of course, invented ...”

“... quite as strong as our sense of jubilation, of ‘a giant step for mankind’. Further, as Peter and Leni Gillman suggest (prosaically or poetically), ‘Space Oddity’ sounds like an experience of shooting heroin, and they sternly quote another Bowie lyric: Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, We know Major Tom’s a junkie. Anyway, Major Tom helped to ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... and accuracy, and huge: it rises from the floor to some feet above your head. Although the hill shading was done by the watercolour painter Paul Sandby, it is not exactly a work of art: one of the few exhibits which qualifies for that description is the map of the siege of La Rochelle engraved by Jacques Callot in 1631 and thickly peopled with the kind ...”

“... A friend​ who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of Bedford had imitated to Lord John Russell who imitated it to Bertrand Russell who imitated it to Conrad Russell who imitated it to J ...”

“... his mind, though not his accent, when he discovered a fast vanishing way of life among the rough hill farmers of his first parish. Yet for all their mud-sodden realism, the ‘Iago Prytherch’ poems he wrote at this time are clearly the work of someone trying hard to convince himself that he might have much in common with ‘an impotent people,/Sick with ...”

“... deserved. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, generally known to the world as Fanny Hill, bases itself on a female sharing of emotions – more fictitiously, but not more factitiously, than ‘Men’. Each of the two sections of the book, which were published some four months apart in 1748 and 1749, is a letter from Fanny to an unnamed female ...”