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“... and for the English and those aspiring to Englishness that generally meant the Tudors, who, from Walter Scott’s Kenilworth to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, still stand in the national imagination for History with a capital H. Among the most important rescued buildings Tinniswood discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up ...”

“... about the machine age and its dehumanising effects, which owed something to his parents’ William Morris-inspired guild socialism. He couldn’t sell enough paintings to live, however, and found working at the Film Unit, mostly under the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti, to be ‘exhilarating stuff’: he had, according to Noxon, an ‘insatiable appetite for new ...”

“... circulate. In the early 17th century, there was said to be a troupe of 12 still spry Herefordshire morris dancers whose combined age was 1200 years. But the most celebrated early modern ancient was Old Tom Parr, who fascinated English physicians and natural philosophers by living to 152 – or so it was widely believed – having fathered a child at 100 and ...”

“... and then mentioned twice in passing, first as a friend of Leigh Hunt and then as a friend of Walter Savage Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb ...”

“... which became a signature strategy. ‘If the painting is an object,’ he told the curator Walter Hopps in 1965, ‘then the object’ – an ale can, for instance – ‘can be a painting,’ and mundane things can be added to paintings as pictorial elements too. Johns liked to render utilitarian items – a drawer, a spoon, a hanger – not only ...”

“... In fact there was more happening here than this, particularly in Pugin’s successors Ruskin and Morris, who believed that Gothic architecture was closer to God because its labourers were able to express themselves while making it – a possibility that Meades does not entertain. And although he occasionally appears to wish this shift had never occurred ...”

“... Zionism by a new generation of Israeli historians – among them Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris – whose work is now entering the mainstream. In a sense, by focusing on the Mandate, Ploughing Sand and One Palestine, Complete are considerations of Israel’s debt to the British and Britain’s injury to the Arabs. Shepherd writes that ‘British rule ...”

“... of silence. I was recently struck by this relationship of music to silence when I saw the Mark Morris Dance Group perform ‘Neue Liebeslieder Walzer’ to the music of Brahms. At the end of the work, when the dance has subsided into a circular tableau of figures sleeping in the shadows, at the precise moment when the sound of the last note is about to ...”

“... read what everybody was reading,’ Sontag wrote in her most gorgeous pen-portrait, the essay on Walter Benjamin called ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’: she might as well have said it of herself. For Benjamin, this was just part of the charm of his collector’s passion for oddities, a result of his eccentric alternation of lassitude with enthusiasm. One ...”

“... worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley seems to have been ...”

“... ever have of recovering homes they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently of their catastrophe. But in 1950, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law which still forbids Selma Tawil and the other 750,000 Palestinians from ever returning ...”

“... marshes in which the malarial mosquitoes breed. For many years I have treasured a quotation from Walter Benjamin which may have helped spawn the character of Arnow or, more likely, contributed something further to a figure already compounded of many memories and unconscious sources: ‘The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing ...”

“... of the most exquisite treasure … The entrance hall was decorated with tiles designed by William Morris, and its staircase led to a corridor illuminated by stained glass designed by Edward Burne-Jones.’ By the end of 1890 Constance and Lady Mount-Temple had become so close that Constance was referring to her as her ‘mother’. When she was ill at ...”

“... English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early ...”

“... and mortification at the many opportunities she had missed. As a child she had met Masefield and Walter de la Mare; nothing much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she ...”