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“... air of men expecting to find evidence of it? No, indeed not. Listening for a second time to Sir Kenneth Clark’s splendid series of television broadcasts on ‘Civilisation’, I was again struck by the importance that Clark attached to confidence as a bonding agent in the advance of civilisation, as it is indeed ...”

“... was doubly betrayed while hardly acknowledged – he grew up with Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum and Clark Gable as his ‘movie fathers’. From an early age he developed what he calls a ‘star astigmatism’. R.D. Laing later told him he had ‘the makings of a first-class schizophrenic’. His problem, he admits, was ‘slipp[ing] onto the soundstage of my ...”

“... an enormous room.’ It’s one of the great historical putdowns: the patrician Whig punchline to Kenneth Clark’s scrutiny of Counter-Reformation art and architecture in his incomparable TV series Civilisation, before he turns from the camera and walks away down the considerable length of the Map Room in the Vatican, an Englishman abroad. His stroll is ...”

“... he was, despite his reputation as an imperialist brute. Superior Person, the biography by Kenneth Rose, makes little mention of the bons mots, but some of them exist in what Curzon would have cringed to hear called the popular memory. ‘Gentlemen do not take soup at luncheon’; ‘Dear me, I never knew that the lower classes had such white ...”

“... that his preferred art of the next generation, the colour field painting of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, was ‘the future that had developed in the aftermath’ not just of Pollock, but also of de Kooning. The ‘Nonstop’ in Krauss’s title refers to de Kooning’s notorious inability, at certain crucial points in his work, to finish a painting ...”

“... that formed the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War. Its author was Alan Clark. He at least did not pretend that Generals Haig and French, unlike Privates Scargill and Heathfield, were not responsible for a million dead.)To all this invocation of high and evasive metaphor, Milne opposes one hard and fast, earthy injunction. It is, in ...”

“... establish a single English tradition as the work of a ‘blood and soil’ nationalist. Jonathan Clark has likened his anthology to the ‘emotional core’ of the core curriculum. But in that overgrown rectory garden the book seemed elegiac and, despite Mr Baker’s recent use of it in a Moscow school, most unlike a modern textbook. Indeed, his anthology ...”

“... the staff in 1924 and succeeded Thayer as editor), Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Pound and Kenneth Burke. And despite Thayer’s distaste for high modernism (Pound’s Cantos were ‘silly’, Joyce’s later work ‘unreadable’), he resolved to print what few others would touch. He was especially kind to Cummings, who had been his friend since ...”

“... But he relives very well the innocence and modesty of those years, of which the hard-nosed Sir Kenneth Berrill, later head of Margaret Thatcher’s Central Policy Review Staff, remarked: ‘We had won the war and we voted ourselves a nice peace.’ As Hennessy himself says, ‘the Britain of the early 1950s, for all the shortages and everyday rubbing ...”

“... rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis ...”

“... to the personal enthusiasm of successive Conservative ministers of education, Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning ...”

“... At a Harvard College full of incipient talent – his classmates included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Donald Hall – Creeley felt discouraged and alone. ‘My eager thirst for knowledge, almost Jude-the-Obscurian in its innocence, was all but shut down by the sardonic stance of my elders,’ he recalled. He left college in 1944 for ...”

“... in Worcester College, Oxford, and though it cannot definitely be proved to be by Marvell, George Clark, the early editor who discovered it, believed it was. In the poem, Marvell says:                                ’Tis always late To struggle with inevitable fate. Much rather though, I know, expect’st to tell How heavy ...”

“... the most appealing a beaker on a dish with a rose belonging to the Saltwood Bequest and so to Alan Clark who is somewhere about, though I don’t see (or hear) him. Then there are lots of terrible flower paintings before some wonderful Goyas in the last room, including a heap of dead fish. The look in the eye of one of the dead bream seems familiar then I ...”

“... sort of busy bee.I’m not suggesting you were some foppish, would-be West End theatre figure like Kenneth Tynan. When you started ‘Tomorrow’, though, you must already have had a group of collaborators and contributors you could nobble for the next issue.I’d enjoyed bringing out the Scorpion and had always remembered it. Then I met a Sri Lankan, Susil ...”