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“... dress suit. It might almost be mistaken for the dénouement of an early Sherlock Holmes story: Dr John H. Watson describing the scene in an East End police station when Holmes literally unmasks the man with an old scar running across his face from eye to chin which turned up his lip into a perpetual grimace, a ‘crippled wretch of hideous aspect’ who hid ...”

“... for others his stolid decency under Pope’s dazzling fire merely sank him deeper into duncedom. Leslie Stephen’s entry on Hill in the first edition of the DNB dismissed him as ‘a bore of the first water’, and subsequent commentators have shared Stephen’s contempt. Only one full-length study of Hill has been published before Gerrard’s, Aaron ...”

“... be possible. Circle, an ‘international survey of Constructive art’ edited by the architect Leslie Martin, the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo and the abstractionist Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only ...”

“... much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her like a kite at the end of a string’. George ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... of the Broad Church network, and eventually to a fellowship in that college, newly relinquished by Leslie Stephen. In June 1870, he was ordained by the Bishop of Ely, and got to know F.D. Maurice, Professor of Moral Philosophy and proponent of Christian Socialism. Carpenter was also friendly with Henry Fawcett and the mathematician W.K. Clifford (not R.K., as ...”

“... their common affiliation. Between Fidel and Michael sits ‘a fitter from the shipyard called Leslie’, who ‘didn’t speak until he was drunk and one night told Cushla he’d love to bath her’.Other details are more pointed. Michael takes Cushla to see John Lavery’s Easter Rising painting, The Trial of Sir Roger ...”

“... Roots (the novel and the mini-series), The Birth of a Nation is part of the cycle that the late Leslie Fiedler called America’s ‘inadvertent epic’. One could add Oscar Micheaux’s early novels and polemical films, Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasssss Song, the radio show Amos n’ Andy, The Bill Cosby Show, Ken Burns’s PBS series ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those big, populous, often Italian paintings much in demand among Elizabethan collectors – paintings you stand back from to see the drama of some mythological or biblical episode unfold. No one stands ...”

“... John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway ...”

“... thinking, yet the move, it not divisive, Can’t help at this stage seeming indecisive. But John De Lorean shows more than strain In several parts of that uplifted face. The handcuffs induce shame on top of pain As in Los Angeles he falls from grace. Busted with many kilos of cocaine Packed nearly in a custom pig-skin case, He’s proved his gull-winged ...”

“... as Hugh Casson later wrote, was ‘a performance’. Few people felt they knew what lay behind it. John Betjeman knew more than most and was probably Lancaster’s closest friend. They met at Oxford and soon realised that they shared a sense of humour and a passion for architecture which was the basis of an enduring friendship. When Betjeman became assistant ...”

“... on ours, though occasionally, almost miraculously, it did. That I can remember the deaths both of Leslie Howard and of Carole Lombard chalked up on the newspaper-sellers’ boards in City Square hardly counts. But there was the afternoon sometime in the 1940s when I was out shopping with Mam and we were walking up Thornton’s Arcade and saw coming down a ...”