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“... abilities, Long printed one of these, a series of verses addressed to the Scottish politician George Haldane, who had arrived in Jamaica as its new governor in 1759. It’s a striking piece, in that although the first half eulogises Haldane, the second half is about Williams himself, and what he represented. It celebrates his having been born in Jamaica ...”

“... other forms of discourse, and that they can be treated in other ways, we may turn to the Hungarian George Konrad. His earlier book The Case Worker has been highly praised, but I have not seen it. The City Builder, presented as fiction, is not a novel in any ordinary sense. It is not easily definable as anything else either: in fact, one would be tempted to ...”

“... off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one umbrella, and ...”

“... It has always been​ said of George Meredith that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story.’ ‘Regarding narrative,’ J.B. Priestley declared, ‘every novel that Meredith wrote is not merely faulty but downright bad.’ On Meredith’s centenary in 1928, Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders vaguely around ...”

“... Macedonia (where he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps), Grieve tells his old schoolteacher, George Ogilvie, about his detailed plans for a hundred essays on Scottish Art and the Scottish Church. He is planning a Scottish Vortex, and is already fizzing with that energy which would make him a power-surge at the end of the Celtic Twilight: ‘I can think ...”

“... in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth ...”

“... with delight’ by the discovery of Fra Angelico, he returned to England determined to be a painter. He was completely untrained for his new career, but what he lacked in formal instruction he seems to have made up by a combination of studying and an instinct for the right company. His reading of Ruskin had already acquainted him with the ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... loved reading letters, including the published kind, but after glancing at a few sentences of George Meredith’s correspondence in 1912, he felt ‘so nauseated’, he told Virginia Woolf, that he shut the book at once: Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of ...”

“... Federal Republic as the epitome of a comfortable German modernism, far less edgy than Otto Dix, George Grosz or Max Beckmann, let alone the wild men of the 1970s and 1980s such as Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer.It helped that Hitler’s personal distaste for Nolde’s work is well attested. His paintings featured prominently in the exhibition of degenerate ...”

“... of reading the interview, to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too late, however. Mitchell was already back at her studio in Paris.As a young painter she had been part of the New York art ...”

“... those of the philanthropist’s blind wife, the servant, an African employed as factotum by the painter George Stubbs. Some of these impersonations are more appealing than others, and there is a dispiriting amount of antiquing going on, as in ‘My garments, good lady,’ and ‘I was a poor servant girl, possessed nothing but the curse of youthful ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... book, The Tennis Court Oath, he announced: ‘I attempt to use words abstractly, as an abstract painter would use paint.’ So the ‘representational’ style of ‘Self-Portrait’ is unrepresentative of some of the abstract difficulties encountered elsewhere in his work. The poem acts more like the accurate sketch of a face which an abstract ...”

“... Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can ...”