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“... in the discussion of religious questions’. Visiting speakers were of the calibre of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, who told the meeting that the Ten Commandments were like an examination paper and should bear the rubric: ‘Only six need be attempted.’ Empson was also starting to be known as a poet and as an occasionally brilliant reviewer in ...”

“... visual art, he began to form his poetic style during the 1910s; soon he was mixing with Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymborg, Alfred Stieglitz and other Modernist artists and writers in Manhattan. His local practice thrived (he later specialised in paediatrics), but still he found time during the next few decades to produce a vast body of ...”

“... inspiration for the authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was stymied ...”

“... during the Blitz, mostly kept out of the news at the time. Several hundred of those whom Henry Moore ennobled in his wartime drawings of shelterers in the Tube were crushed, drowned or suffocated in catastrophes at Marble Arch, Balham, Bank and Bethnal Green. In 1975 there was the macabre case of Driver Newson, who careered full force into the buffers at ...”

“... it brings to mind: Berger and Heron writing in the New Statesman; Freud, Minton, Sutherland and Moore reproduced in Penguin New Writing; Bacon photographed in Vogue. There are very few surprises. Can the Arts Council and the weeklies have got it right every time? Were there no underground movements or unfashionable painters? The first half seems less ...”

“... though she inhabits a 16th-century bedroom and confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as Hope puts ...”

“... in London.’ She doesn’t mention the reason she came south: when she was three her father, Charles, left and the family was forced to uproot. Her parents had not been happily married; Charles had wanted to be a sailor since he’d been a child but had been pressured by his mother to take over the family business. It ...”

“... decrees of emancipation. A particularly interesting artist in this connection is the sculptor Charles Cordier, whose superb bust of Said Abdalla de la tribu de Mayac, royaume du Darfour was exhibited at the Salon of 1848 (and again in bronze in 1850), and whose no less splendid Vénus Africaine confirmed his success at the Salon of 1851. Cordier’s ...”

“... political consensus. Then I remember E.M. Forster’s image for the force that speaks to Mrs Moore in the echo in the Marabar Caves: ‘Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity – the undying worm itself.’ It’s this sense of an unbudging, implacable destructiveness that ...”

“... of ‘historical London figures’ and ‘modern day heroes’. Ada (Lovelace), who worked with Charles Babbage on his ‘analytical engine’, is paired with Phyllis (Pearsall), the artist who claimed to have tramped three thousand miles in mapping streets for the A-Z. The most recent partnership, Jessica (Ennis) and Ellie (Simmonds), were christened, as ...”

“... on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on ...”

“... University in Baltimore in 1933. At that time his main reason for being in America was to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, duly published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. In a year that would have seemed laborious even to a writer not suffering from marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment ...”

“... Conrad’s perfect wife, stays at home worrying about him.In the poem’s dedication to Thomas Moore, Byron makes a rhetorical apology for having ‘deviated into the gloomy vanity of “drawing from self”’. Eisler says he was here acknowledging that ‘The Corsair was the most autobiographical of his poems.’ But to believe this is to comply with ...”

“... 20 April 1816) Claire Clairmont finally manoeuvred him into bed. Seymour’s statement that Thomas Moore ‘had never bothered to read the memoirs which Byron gave him when he visited Venice in the autumn of 1819’, and so was entirely dependent in 1827, after they had been destroyed, on Mary Shelley’s own account when writing his biography of Byron, is ...”

“... will remain an exclusively male preserve. There’s an entertaining paragraph on Demi Moore as a female warrior in Scott’s G.I. Jane (1997), ‘buffed and cropped and going through intense training tests to prove a girl could do it’. Buffing and cropping is, however, only one of the many roles war has encouraged or obliged women to ...”