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“... that he could not and perhaps did not want to understand’. How much better if the Scots artist William Scott had not tried to explain the force which impelled him to introduce frying pans and kitchen objects into his works. Their ‘multivalent symbolic significance’ at first reflected the ‘elemental life of the simple poor’ and then became ‘the ...”

“... department for the Prime Minister – the ‘hole in the centre of the system’, as Lord Hunt put it. That most premiers have managed to live with this situation is testament to the strength of the amateur tradition in British politics. Even Macmillan, for all his perception of the problem, still preferred to govern by means of haphazard and ...”

“... all Nature to submit.A quarter of a century after Toft had been outed as a liar, the Reverend William Whiston still thought the rabbit births ‘undeniably real’. They were ‘no other indeed than one direct completion of the eminent Signal before us, that towards the end of the world, “Monstrous Women should bring forth Monsters.”’ Outlandish ...”

“... Henry Clutton, who had originally been appointed and had done the Chapter House (assisted by William Burges, experimenting with colours), rendered himself ineligible by converting to Catholicism.Had Clutton continued, the cathedral would be a building rather different from the one we see today. He wasn’t a man to hide his Francophile ...”

“... Sumner, meanwhile, for all his pretensions to cerebral aloofness – he watches his first whale hunt from the crow’s nest – is ready to get his hands dirty when he thinks he needs to. There’s a fight with the crew of another ship in a brothel in Lerwick. ‘Sumner, watching, would prefer to stay neutral – he is a surgeon, not a brawler – but he ...”

“... possessing People with an ill Opinion of the Government, no Government cou’d subsist’. The hunt for the perpetrators (juiced by rewards of £200 for the author and £50 for the printer) began as soon as the Memorial hit the streets in July 1705. But when proceedings reached the Old Bailey in late August, its authorship was still an unsolved mystery and ...”

“... in any foreseeable economies. I don’t know whether the present Chairman of the Arts Council, William Rees-Mogg, believes that market principles should rule the Garden, in this sense. He is a former, and more than former, journalist: I notice that he is to serve as advisory editor of the new, the re-animated Time and Tide, staffed by refugees from the ...”

“... industry. Informally, the phrase ‘intellectual reparations’ was used for this. By then, the hunt for books and documents was converging with more notorious US government programmes, such as Paperclip, which allowed members of the Nazi scientific elite with priceless experience in long-range rocket technology and atomic weapons research to be brought to ...”

“... while at Cambridge and consequently gave up his original plan of a career in the Church, also knew William Godwin and Coleridge. George, the only one of the brothers whose portrait survives, has a look of the latter about him with his long hair and slightly abstracted gaze. All the brothers travelled widely and spoke and read several languages. When they were ...”

“... who commissioned Leutze’s painting, probably knew and had certainly read his fellow Bostonian, William Prescott, whose Conquest of Mexico was published in 1843, and whose concern about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest ‘lies between every line of his three volumes’, as William Truettner puts it in an essay in ...”

“... attended it. His characters are historically real, although perhaps not historically important: William Grimshaw, the fanatical wandering preacher, and his associates, early martyrs – the word is not too strong – in the cause of the simplest and most primitive of trade unions; a cast of six-year-old children sent to work in the pits, of narrow-minded ...”

“... any given household and the kinds of gift they could demand for their service. By contrast, William de Longchamp, lord chancellor in the late 12th century, tried to improve his public image by writing his own praise poems and paying French musicians to sing them in the streets.Medieval minstrels left few written traces, and the references that do appear ...”

“... of seeing that treachery is a complex and uncertain matter – except during the excitement of the hunt and kill. Anthony Blunt’s actions in the last war and afterwards probably constitute a particularly difficult instance of political disloyalty, calling for unusual delicacy of judgment. The facts would have to be absolutely definite first – especially in ...”

“... about its origins and bring alive again the inquirers and artists who have gone before him. William Borlase was the vicar of Ludgvan in Penwith. At 52 he felt ‘his energies starting to dim’ but then, in May 1748, he ‘happened to bump into two distinguished antiquarians’ – also parsons, needless to say – and what he told them about local ...”

“... grain of his natural genius. He did not want to write the sort of ‘unmisgiving’ poetry (Leigh Hunt’s remarkable adjective) which came, with help from Shakespeare, like the leaves to the tree. If Keats had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the ...”