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“... and crowning the city was the church of Sacré-Coeur, very white, standing like some dry Byzantine bird, to my mind hollow-eyed and without conscience, presiding over the habits of the flesh and – to judge by what I read in newspapers – its crime also; its murders, rapes, its shootings for jealousy and robbery. As my French improved, the secrets of Paris ...”

“... Lincolnshire Poacher’, one of the best-known English folk songs (and a favourite of George IV’s), gives voice to a familiar figure, a canny, twinkly-eyed dissident who strikes out by moonlight for illicit game. ‘’Tis my delight on a shiny night,’ he boasts in the chorus, ‘in the season of the year.’ Since at least the late 19th ...”

“... had several longstanding women friends who corresponded, and she wrote to all her siblings except George, her mentally retarded older brother. But, Tomalin thinks, the reserve may not have been breached even in the unrecorded conversations and letters, many afterwards destroyed, which passed between Jane and her closest friend, her sister Cassandra. Nokes ...”

“... as good a beginning to a tragedy. If any couple bore out that maxim it was Annabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron. The ‘happy’ chapter lasted barely 24 hours, the ‘ever after’ is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s ...”

“... up the ground at the point where lightning strikes and uncover the magic eggs of the Mabanganana bird. There are stories, also, which seem to emanate from ‘Beachcomber’, like that of Joseph Furtenbach, a mathematician of Ulm (and obvious ancestor of Dr Strabismus of Utrecht) who, in order to prove that the ‘Earth rotates, fired a cannon vertically and ...”

“... to a palette, ready to be applied to the vellum with a thin brush made of squirrel hairs set in a bird quill mounted on a wooden stick.In terms both of materials and technique, limning was a descendant of the medieval tradition of manuscript illumination: to limn – from the Latin luminare – meant ‘to illuminate’. The Italian miniatura (from which the ...”

“... over the English Channel towards the chalk cliffs of Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, both the shot and George Fenton’s orchestral score slyly reminiscent of the opening of The Sound of Music, though the solitary figure who gradually comes into view on the cliff edge is dressed in a sturdy bright blue anorak rather than the costume of a novice nun. Unlike Julie ...”

“... at issue. In literary and philosophical discussions of the Holocaust it is often assumed that (as George Steiner put it) ‘each of us has been diminished by the enactment of a potential subhumanity latent in all of us.’ This belief inevitably leads to the question: if this is man, what does it mean to be human? If the Holocaust is unique, that question ...”

“... establishing what are now household names of useful products – Reckitt, Ransome, Cadbury, Bird, Courtauld. Success could not be foreseen: the promise was not sure, and false steps were dangerous. The threat of trial and execution for treason, which was an elastic concept in Stuart Scotland, forced the Homes into a period of near-penniless exile: the ...”

“... authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was stymied from the outset by ...”

“... not get on with. Obsessed with self. Dead eyes, and a red beard, long narrow pale face. A strange bird.’ Hardy, a little earlier, had offered less of a challenge to his own conventionality: ‘Nice, dried up, alert old fellow; liked him.’ Having read Sons and Lovers, he observed severely – and a trifle oddly for one who had devoted ten years to adultery ...”

“... every morning the poet should stand at the window and remember that nothing that they see, not a bird or stone, has in its possession the name they give it. This isn’t all that far from the cultural diagnoses offered by the experimentalists Paterson was complaining about; it’s the reason many of them use impersonal composition devices or unreconciled ...”

“... I knew a number of the people concerned and remember visiting the place. It was as talkative as a bird-house. Madge and Weinberger give some examples of ‘verbalisation in the art-socialisation context’. (Sad to think that Madge learnt to write prose on the prewar Daily Mirror.) Their examples are beside the point. It might be more instructive to look at ...”

“... Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of ...”

“... the aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”