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“... homes, and he improved. Thanks to the admirable efforts of Sydney J. Freeberg, now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Bobby returned there, on a graduate programme. But no good. There was a history of riding fast – on horses at the ranch, or on bikes in the city: Bobby died on 12 January 1965, after bashing into an Eighth Avenue bus on ...”

“... X-rated strip made with Bill Berkson in 1971 enjoying congress with another comic character called Henry (created by Carl Anderson in 1932) in a pretty comprehensive range of sexual positions. As in his pseudo-Christian assemblages, his many collages which make liberal use of male pornography and the more explicit bits of I Remember, Brainard manages to fuse ...”

“... don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener,’ Henry James wrote to another impassioned interior decorator, their mutual friend Mary Hunter, in 1913. At the time, Wharton was contemplating the purchase of a substantial estate near where Hunter lived in Essex; but while this came to nothing, the novelist’s ...”

“... not thy nose wipe.’ Urbanitatis was used in the education of the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is ...”

“... that Hockney should not have been hurt by Robert Hughes’s description of him as ‘the Cole Porter of modern art’. He has been true to his talent, which is great, and avoided boredom for himself and his audience by turning to photography, computer graphics or Picasso when a line of development did not seem to be leading to anything new. Perhaps his ...”

“... at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, sold out and had adulatory reviews. The Shankars met Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller, and over the next few years travelled all over Europe and eventually to the US, where Ravi heard Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, beginning a lifelong ...”

“... of England’, ‘4. or 5 different shap’d snuffboxes’) in the care of the marquis’s porter and entered Wolton’s service at the end of June. Their route lay east and southwards, through Reims, Metz, Nancy and Dijon to Lyon. In each city they set up a riding space in the yard of an inn or on a patch of grass, publicised Wolton’s bareback ...”

“... contribution to the discredited field of historical analogy (Brexit as the modern equivalent of Henry VIII’s break with the papacy). The main emphasis, though, was on Danish financial interests. The headline that no doubt mattered most in this pro-business paper was ‘Brexit Puts Pressure on Danish Investments in the UK’. The leftish Information ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... memory of Plath – an argument that certainly pushes to a new level of sophistication the Cole Porter lyric ‘I’m always true to you darling in my fashion’ – it’s hard not to feel that Hughes never escaped the baffling labyrinth into which his relationship with Plath led him. It is to the doomed Minotaur rather than the heroic Theseus that he ...”

“... himself from the funeral, ‘very little regretted even by his nearest acquaintance’, or as Henry Fielding put it more bluntly, ‘pissed upon with scorn and contempt’. Foote’s celebrity status can be measured in the proliferation of theatrical prints and paintings of him onstage, working the audience with his idiosyncratic blend of goofy humour and ...”

“... the military (he became a pacifist), the aristocracy (he followed the American writer Henry George in believing in common ownership of land) and the Orthodox Church (which excommunicated him) – increased his stature in revolutionary times, as did the government’s hostility towards him and the fact that he was sufficiently engaged in reality to ...”

“... he would find it. And so he does, computer, keys and cards all intact and handed over by a smiling porter called, appropriately, Christian. An empty train to Leeds and another to Settle and we are back home by five having buttered toast round the fire and unable to believe our luck. A good beginning to the year.3 February. The front of the ...”

“... plotting revolution with Gogarty upstairs in the Bailey over fried chops, dried chips and black porter. James Joyce selling tickets in Ireland’s first cinema on Talbot Street. The lies poured like Niagara. ‘Knew them all! Perfectly ordinary people! Drop in here for a drink and a chat just as we’re doing now! All that Renaissance stuff is pure ...”

“... stamping of feet was our reply. 9 Supper. The regal dining hall graced by the likeness of Henry the Eighth – those tight-sheathed calves, that beard – all by the sumptuous Holbein limned; inside that singularly towering hall that choir lofts made appear so tall, it was perpetually murky despite the violet conflagration, that filtered through the ...”