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“... all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Anglis’s wholesale butchery, I read Burckhardt. I also read Vasari and saw him patronise Uccello, the prick. Poor Paolo, Vasari wrote, he was commissioned to do a work with a chameleon. Not knowing what a chameleon was, he painted a camel ...”

“... that he had met the Shekinah (a manifestation of divinity) in the form of a Venetian woman whose X-ray vision allowed her to look into the Earth’s core and see Satan. For this he was officially declared insane (but not a heretic) by the Inquisition in Venice. He spent much of his tenure as the Collège de France’s first professor of Arabic comfortably ...”

“... and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the will, and a complete lack of ‘the healthy moderation of the Anglo-Saxon’. What, Phelps asks, is the ...”

“... with Sweets Edison, Stuff Smith and Juan Tizol), Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys, Ray Charles. And towards the end of the day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful with the sandstone in the precincts of Lake Powell, we had a medley that included Clarence Williams (‘You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old’), Van ...”

“... today is in keeping with a longer history of manipulation. After visiting the studio, Man Ray reported that he was ‘more impressed than in any cathedral. I was overwhelmed by its whiteness and lightness … [It] was like entering another world.’ Brancusi did everything he could to maintain this atmosphere, dressing all in white, sporting a white ...”

“... go out much. Place is unimportant. It’s where you live, no more than that: a stopover. How did William Burroughs finish up in a clapboard cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, with his brood of sleek, well-fed felines? The old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second ...”

“... things for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and ...”

“... favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and French intellectuals flocked there, and to the larger shop on rue de l’Odéon, where it moved in 1922. ‘From that moment on,’ Beach said, ‘for over twenty years, they ...”

“... Editors like Ricks allow us to appreciate how nothing in poetic creation is given. Like the x-ray pictures of paintings, they reveal the hidden outlines of earlier texts – sometimes the existence of a different painting altogether. What are we to make of such information? How is it to affect our reading? Add the questions of biographical and critical ...”

“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”

“... was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that people weren’t ...”

“... by others for bringing home the full horror of the war (the Dean of Durham and the zoologist Ray Lankester thought it a disgrace), and it was the one scene in the film that was not authentic and had been faked up behind the lines. Hynes brings the same flair to advertisements. He reproduces a deliciously modish Bond Street tailor’s advertisement ...”

“... The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast ...”

“... essays. Out of the window – if these experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel ...”

“... up with Marxists in London, with middle-aged working-class socialists and with the youth-conscious Ray Gosling – whose ‘homo-erotic picture of the pop star as sacrificial victim was something new in my experience.’ Awarded a place at Cambridge, to read English, he hoped to find a Centre 42 atmosphere, but was disappointed. He did, however, meet Paz, the ...”