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“... with skin as biliously green as the Wicked Witch of the West and, in a riotous series of drawings, Philip Guston transformed the president’s ski nose and heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his 1960 play The Best Man and, beginning in the late 1960s, an impressive ...”

“... chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the ...”

“... a Gothic spandrel. De Morgan’s strong unassertive style adapted well. It was cool enough for Philip Webb, but it could be robust. Norman Shaw used the tiles in the ‘Old English’ interior of the Tabard Inn at Bedford Park, the artistic suburb, built from the late 1870s, where the inhabitants ‘read Rossetti by ...”

“... time and for the effect of rendering into Latin testimony given in a native language (English or Norman French, or in Cragh’s case Welsh), illustrating and probing the variety of attitudes reflected in witnesses’ responses to rigorous grilling by the commissioners. In the second half of the book Bartlett broadens the scope of his study to explore the ...”

“... life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’ Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and ...”

“... must be to the social historian with an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the ...”

“... to America, which has been fashionable ever since Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations. Philip Toynbee, in the Observer, came right out with it: ‘by now it is hard to see any reason why an American writer or artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret ...”

“... joint practice. The creation of James Stirling, world-class architect, the man who as much as Philip Johnson or Arata Isosaki invented the ‘signature building’ and who travelled the rewarding circuit of international big money prizes, lectures and juries from the 1960s onwards, is a very contemporary tale of celebrity and image, fame and ...”

“... The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto ...”

“... didn’t usually bother to do their reading. In the documents collected here only the report on Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago delivers the scrutiny a literary hack might apply, with attention paid to ‘his usual obscene and bitter style’. Elsewhere, agents crib from newspaper reviews and interviews and watch their subjects on TV. They ...”

“... joys and sorrows go straight back to the early Romantics. He is not a bit like Hardy and Philip Larkin, who are often associated with him. No comparison could be more misleading. Their idiom is one of deprivation, of that pleasure in things going wrong, or never having been right, which has become so much a part of English culture and ...”

“... of MacGregor was a public act and he was to do rather maladroitly what his predecessor, Sir Norman Siddall, was doing by stealth – and he was to do it very publicly, as he was expected to. The hand of the Government was brutally clear, for example, in the DHSS’s decision to ‘deem’ that the miners were receiving £15-a-week strike pay – they ...”

“... Charles V. Indeed, the basic attitudes could have been traced back to the days when Richard I and Philip Augustus had ignored Papal attempts to prevent them from fighting over the Vexin. Nor is the constitutional contrast between France and Spain as clear as was once thought. The late Professor J.W. Daly has reminded us that we do not know what an ‘absolute ...”

“... Edmund Wilson’s cold eye cast alike on political rhetoric, Depression politics and American sex, Norman Mailer’s exploding and exploiting of American myths, are notable instances. And this hasn’t only been a male preserve: witness the admirable Janet Flanner (New Yorker correspondent from 1925 to 1975), Elizabeth Hardwick’s friend Mary McCarthy, and ...”

“... of his emotions that a tender letter written in 1876 to console someone in trouble was assumed by Philip Henderson to have been intended to comfort either Edward or Georgiana Burne-Jones, while Kelvin believes that it may have been sent to Jane to commiserate with her on the end of her affair with Rossetti. Perhaps the most moving of the previously ...”