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“... the short straw. But when there were floods on the Arno several years ago, we already knew where Florence was on the map; and we knew for quite independent reasons, which then enhanced our concern, not only for any randomly unfortunate victims but also for the threat to uniquely significant parts of what we prize as our cultural heritage. A more complicated ...”

“... consternation, Sidney ignored this order, crossing the Alps into Italy, visiting Genoa and Florence in direct contravention of Languet’s advice, and living for some months in Venice. Languet wrote to him in alarm, warning of the dangers of Rome, with its popish snares and delusions: ‘For free minds nothing is more pernicious than those arts which ...”

“... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...”

“... C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and ...”

“... in her, poor thing, and not wilfulness ... If once I get you here again’ – he is addressing Florence Dugdale – ‘won’t I clutch you tight?’ Six weeks later he told her, from Boscastle: the visit to this neighbourhood has been a very painful one to me, & I have said a dozen times I wish I had not come. What possessed me to do it! I went to St ...”

“... away to sea – prompted, one poem suggests, by a baleful look shot by the poet from her pram – Florence Margaret Smith lived in her Palmers Green house; from her mid-twenties, nicknamed Stevie after the jockey Steve Donoghue, she lived there alone with her aunt, producing three novels and a torrent of poems and articles, and working as a secretary at ...”

“... The Discourses, a man of affairs trying to make something happen, but the author of The History of Florence and of those strange letters: the man who could write ‘I love my native city more than my own soul,’ who corresponded with the ancients so vividly one can imagine him waiting patiently, day by day, for their replies. Thus Debord’s story is a story ...”

“... As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up, like Fay Wray, squeezed in its paw. A.M. Gibbs spends most of the introduction to Bernard Shaw: A Life justifying his decision to return to a very well-ploughed furrow ...”

“... by André Gide in 1895, ‘greedily eating little vanilla ice creams’ at the Caffè Gambrinus in Florence. Gide reports: ‘He speaks with a clear voice, rather icy but soft and wheedling. His glance is quite cold: perhaps he is cruel, or perhaps it is his refined sensuality that makes him seem so to me. On his head he wears a plain black bowler ...”

“... a brilliant collection of short (and sometimes not so short) fictions, which remains, in its King Penguin edition, the most beautifully designed of his many beautifully designed books; and 1982, Janine, apparently Gray’s favourite among his own novels, and mine too. Janine is intimate rather than epic: it is written as an interior monologue, and this ...”

“... within a wider ecology of making. Theophilus, Diderot and Gropius all viewed the craftsman as king, and the workshop as an unparalleled laboratory of observation. The idea that the artist’s studio was somehow different from the artisan’s workshop took off in the 15th century. In Hall’s phrase, ‘the Renaissance concept of the studio involved a ...”

“... massive. She learnt the art of public speaking, as well as the simple, accessible language of the King James Bible. Like so many other British politicians over the centuries, she would draw on this source regularly in her speeches, quoting verses, telling homely parables, and infusing everything she said with a fire and earnestness borrowed from the ...”

“... brought fireworks both offensive and benign to the European world. By the 16th century, crowds in Florence and Siena beheld huge wooden wheels, lavishly decorated, spinning on poles and emitting glittering cascades from attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni ...”

“... minute letters, as though intended to remain invisible, Andrew has set down Jocasta’s lines from King Oedipus: ‘Fear not thy mother’s marriage bed/For many a man has in his dream/Slept with his mother.’ The incestuous union was consummated some fourteen years later, at the Clavertons’ town house in Curzon Street, during the young man’s first visit ...”

“... of Elizabeth Warren being prevented a few weeks ago from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate.1 What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced and formally excluded from the debate (I don’t know enough about the rules of procedure in the Senate to have a sense of how justified, or not, that was); but ...”