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“... it clear that Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, Franz von Stuck’s Die Svende, Bastien-Lepage’s Sarah Bernhardt or Leighton’s Bath of Psyche demanded special attention or at least a central position – indeed Bastien-Lepage’s frame is made of steel, which would it itself have encouraged other pictures to keep their distance. Leighton’s tabernacle ...”

“... effect of which is to leave an overriding impression of eccentricity and bad temper. We meet Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, lamenting her ‘misfortune to suffer very great mischiefs from the assistance of architects’; Sir John Cope, of Bramshill, whose ‘apartments are so vastly spacious that one generally sees Sir John toward the winter put on his ...”

“... son of Sir Norman Braose.’ We meet Sir Norman kissing little Alex, who is Nan’s girl, and Sarah says: ‘Say hello to Aunt Emma, Alex.’ Emma tells little Alex she is going to stay at Nayles, ‘a marvellous house with an old family name’, where Emma used to stay when she was a little girl ‘because mummy and daddy were abroad’. It is a good ...”

“... Dinner in 20 minutes when Daddy gets home.” Max replies instantly. “I ate with Sarah and Penelope already. Bye.” ’ There is something eerie about the joke and Andersen’s humour is often dark; his characters can seem uncomfortable not only with the shape of things to come, but with a future that arrived too soon. ‘Do other people get ...”

“... sour and thwarted disposition. In general, he is content to play the attendant lord, hosting grand dinner parties, humouring Norman Lamont, condescending to dispense advice to Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Each of them, according to Wyatt’s diaries, looks to him for guidance, either in person or via his News of the World ‘Voice of ...”

“... his distaste for the everyday business of governing is somewhat similar. His visions are grand but his explanations have been piecemeal and inadequate. He justified healthcare as a basic human right and said that the programme would help to balance the budget. Both can be reasons, but Obama gave both, at different times, as primary reasons. There is ...”

“... and on this side of the Atlantic it was often republished, alongside Moore’s song about Sarah Curran, from the fourth book of Irish Melodies, there known simply by its opening words, ‘She is far from the land’, but now more defiantly identified as ‘The Betrothed of Robert Emmet’. Over the last twenty years, a reviewer of the final volumes of ...”

“... own words that her models were the divas of opera and theatre, or the great dancers of ballet: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse et al (silent movies are much closer to ballet and grand theatre than they are to Breaking Bad). Both Bernhardt and Duse offered the young Negri the same melancholy advice: one could choose ...”

“... entitlements were his own. During his 17-month foreign excursion of 1830-31, he’d ignored the Grand Tour route and retraced Byron’s steps through Spain, Greece, Malta, Albania and Turkey instead. He would use his travels in autobiographical fiction: unmistakably Byronic heroes – rich, beautiful, aristocratic, young – are driven by Sehnsucht and ...”

“... at the Beginning of a Great Career, features none of the planetary collisions, the cheek-chewing grand guignol of the legend of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. There are no treaties with dark gods to be unpacked into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same ...”

“... Very occasionally, on great issues, it may be appropriate, necessary even, for a leader bent on a grand goal to avoid full frankness until he or she judges the time is right, lest premature disclosure of the task in hand makes the ambitious destination that is being sought impossible to reach. On Ireland, so nonsensically counter-productive was the ...”

“... scale, he could always do one-off travesties – things like his send-up of Reynolds’s Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces. Gillray’s parody was called La Belle Assemblée. In place of the gracious solitary aristocrat, multiple ladies are muscling into line for the sacrifice; among them, as Loxton puts it, ‘the rotund, overstuffed Mrs ...”

“... of everything’. He disappeared on a long trip to Egypt with Eleonora Duse, Italy’s answer to Sarah Bernhardt. When he returned, he rarely bothered to show up in Parliament, concentrating on this and other love affairs and on his work. In one of his rare Parliamentary appearances, he suddenly shifted from the extreme right to the far ...”

“... radio programme: that record is held by the Shipping Forecast, at 98, closely followed by The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee since 1925. The format of Desert Island Discs is deeply and reassuringly familiar to its audience, each episode, according to its recent presenter Kirsty Young, ‘a well-tethered hammock’ cradling itself ...”

“... and remained active in radical politics for the next thirty-odd years. At the age of 19 he married Sarah Johnson, his landlady’s daughter, and she brought him enough money to establish himself in Lambeth as a bookseller and stationer. He campaigned among other things for a new, more humane system of poor relief, improvement in the management of lunatic ...”