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“... says, ‘the old gang, which we must identify through our knowledge of hard bitches and riding-masters, will transform itself by shedding its definite articles, “deep in clear lake”.’ The fit reader is thus identified by Auden, and forced to identify himself. His identity is political: not just ‘the Left’, but that part of the Left that knows ...”

“... to show off in public exhibitions. Showing off often meant paying homage to the 17th-century masters. For Gainsborough, success was synonymous with Van Dyck, who was regarded as the master of grand manner portraiture. From Bath, Gainsborough could easily visit the houses of a number of aristocratic collectors (important for an artist who didn’t travel ...”

“... John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the visual arts – drawing, painting, photography, film – but also short stories, journals, screenplays, travel articles, letters, television scripts, translations, novels, poems, even a requiem in three parts which gives a wrenching account of the untimely deaths of three of Berger’s neighbours ...”

“... as blunt, uncourtly and dressed always in black, Walsingham has long defied categorisation. John Cooper’s book is a fresh attempt to assess the accuracy of these opposing images. It charts Walsingham’s life from his birth in 1531 or 1532, on the cusp of the Henrician Reformation and the break with Rome, through his education at King’s ...”

“... of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is a worthy member of the distinguished Modern Masters series, which includes excellent semi-technical short books on, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert ...”

“... handle the work of painters born since 1945, and regrets that he has written so little about Old Masters, seeming, a shade implausibly, to blame this omission on lack of nerve. Occasionally he worries that his writing about painting could be an intrusion on the painting, and for that reason he has refrained from writing anything in the catalogues of some of ...”

“... the heroine (born in 1844 and now 17) has been brought up. The inmates are described, among them John Vroom, ‘a thin, dark, knifish boy about fourteen’ whose doxy is (implausibly) ‘stitching dog-skins onto stolen dogs, to make them seem handsomer breeds than what they really were’, as Vroom himself does ‘a deal with a dog-thief. This man had a ...”

“... thighs and remarkably elastic anatomy, than among portraits or specimens of natural history (the John Dory, a monkey, a dromedary).Having established the distinction between Olympian poetry and quotidian prose, he obtained startling effects by allowing elements of one mode to cross into another: he gave his antique heroes the huge moustaches of contemporary ...”

“... stories here – and there are good ones by slightly older writers, such as Elizabeth Jolley, Olga Masters, Judah Waten – bring out something important in the nature of the form. It can carry an immense charge of social implication provided this remains immanent and tacit, visible only in the perspective and depth. Any attempt to make play with it, as the ...”

“... consequences of their experiment, and could not have prevented them if they had. Their lords and masters, the politicians, treated them as dwarves forging weapons for their high wars. The forces by which they were driven were those of national pride and love of power. The Japanese leaders knew there was no hope of victory, but feared the suicidal patriotism ...”

“... losing the power which they have effectively had since the collapse of central authority left them masters of the enterprises. Hence the efforts to bring the shares back home: Russian managers, like public-sector managers everywhere, define the company’s interests in different terms from private-sector managers. Still, it was happening. What had taken ...”

“... of Paris are now drawing students from far and wide. He sets himself up against the reigning masters like William of Champeaux, a Platonist of whom Gordon Leff says that he resembled Lenin by confusing mental categories with real life. After a trip north to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of ...”

“... Cook adored ‘our trusty friend the Watch’, relied on it absolutely, and told his Admiralty masters that K-1 had passed its tests with flying colours. The clock subsequently followed the British flag across the Pacific: with Cook to his death in Hawaii in 1779, then with Captain Arthur Phillip to the new penal settlement in Botany Bay in 1788. A second ...”

“... It is significant that the only new recruit made in the 20th century to the first rank of Old Masters was (as the late Francis Haskell pointed out) Georges de La Tour, whose brilliantly lit pickpocket and solemn, candlelit Magdalen both derive from Caravaggio’s inventions. The reassessment of Caravaggio was in part due to the advent of loan ...”

“... different kinds of inability to act: these are the overt themes of many of the poems in John Fuller’s inventive new volume. The title, Lies and Secrets, does not belong to any one poem, but is a warning that no statement found in the book should be relied on either for straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are ...”