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“... the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 ...”

“... and indeed a frustrated cadre of pragmatic and independent-minded politicians – escape the iron cage of partisan constraint. In early 1974 Britain seemed divided and ungovernable, with Ted Heath’s Conservative government blown off course by the miners’ strike. In the February election the voters returned an uncertain decision: Harold Wilson’s Labour ...”

“... turned out to be a political liability for Weiner. His phone was the thing he used to rattle the cage. Joe Flaherty, Mailer’s 1969 campaign manager, wrote that it was ‘a dull campaign in a sad city with a grimace of despair carved into its face. Mailer and Breslin managed, for a short season, to turn that grimace into a grin.’ Weiner put grins on the ...”

“... action, as cringing as it is brave. In Henry IV, it is the women who speak the truth: ‘No, Sir John,’ Mistress Quickly says to Falstaff when he insists he knows she has been hostess to petty crime. ‘You do not know me, Sir John; I know you, Sir John.’ As with Lady Percy, it is ...”

“... for some must be that it is now safely dead and buried: there is no live bear to break out of its cage and retaliate. In 1995 Francis Beckett added his Enemy Within to the growing list of works. His researches were thorough; he had gone round meeting veterans of bygone days, nearly all of whom were happy to chew over their recollections with him. The book has ...”

“... In September 2004, the German sculptor John Bock turned the main gallery at the ICA into something like a giant treehouse, a cluster of cabins, platforms and dens bashed together out of plywood and hung about with tinfoil, blankets and washing-lines. To get between them you’d climb ladders and squeeze through tunnels, balance on walkways and clamber over hay bales ...”

“... job of political officer at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. It sets up that narrative cage, or hide, which is now a Theroux speciality. He is the spectator indulging an affectionate – sometimes a whimsically sentimental – sense of place: but protected from any messy involvement by being merely ‘stationed’ or breaking his journey. Having a ...”

“... by Edward I of England) were soon established as Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by primogeniture, as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest ...”

“... hasn’t yet looked into the extent of this practice.As children of the spied-on, my brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped (they divorced when we were young). My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of SDS, and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”

“... daughter. Their relationship is tense. She is not Cordelia. They will not sing like birds in the cage. He flees from her back to Camden to be taken care of by ‘Vaughan’, a mothering Irish slattern from his days at the Slade. ‘I intend,’ he says, ‘to put up a struggle.’ Let’s hope it avails. Storey’s early work, appealing as it did to a ...”

“... composer of the Blue Danube Waltz owned a number of sea-birds. One day he left the door of their cage open. The birds followed democratic procedure in deciding whether they should escape. Only a small number voted approval.’ Which episode reduces to the words and to the promised homophone, ‘Les trois mouettes de Strauss: pour’. These are up-market ...”

“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... and dirt, piles it on), who is holding out his own toy for the other boy to see. He is shaking the cage, baiting its inmate – ‘a live rat!’ The poem ends: ‘And the two children laughed at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the ...”