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“... chic (the ready-dressed blue and silver faux-fir). For the unsure, there are ‘treetorials’ at John Lewis or ‘Christmas design consultation’ for £250. They’ll even decorate your tree for you. Most companies are cleverer with their own displays now, and recognise the opportunity for spectacle. You don’t even need the tree – just a surprising ...”

“... to the Manchester United superstore, was to accompany her on a tour of the Deansgate branch of the John Rylands University Library. Mrs Rylands, the extraordinary founder of the collection, was particularly keen on Bibles, and among the many Biblical treasures is a tiny triangular fragment of the text of St John’s ...”

“... shut behind her. Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John, who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view. In John’s unfinished mural Lyric Fantasy, painted soon after her death, Ida stands to one side of the group of women and children who make ...”

“... go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its characters has been too often muffled by bossy authorial intrusion (Spark, Drabble, Byatt); its comedy is too easy, too ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... his contemporary Musil, was uniting the two by the same aesthetic. How he must have responded to Ruskin’s comment, in The Stones of Venice, that it was just as exciting to study the little green crabs in the weed on the mooring stage as it was to disembark and enjoy the Titians in the Venetian palazzo. The crabs in Proust’s case were the denizens of ...”

“... imagine that the paper feels some obligation towards a man whose twenty-year teaching career at Ruskin College, Oxford, was cut short because he went on writing for it during the Wapping lockout, there must be more to it than that. The Principle of Duty was enthusiastically reviewed in the Financial Times, the Mail on Sunday hailed it as a blast of the ...”

“... of nature which grow within a man marked for decline. Artists such as Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Graham Sutherland depart from his text, and while it is tempting to quote the manner of their going it is more illuminating to give a sample of the way in which he addresses himself to the much more difficult task of describing the nature of a ...”

“... Boers’ spy in the town, reporting to the ‘Irish Brigade’ in the Boer Army which was led by John MacBride (the husband of Maud Gonne; I assume Kiernan is the novelist’s creation). Kiernan has two feisty daughters, Bella and Jane, who supply the romantic subplots very efficiently. Bella will ingeniously escape the siege with her Portuguese hairdresser ...”

“... of the maimed Victorian sexual life – the disclosed private writings of Munby, Housman, John Addington Symonds and others – but we are strangely put off by the unseemly nakedness of their personal outpourings. The imagery they chose – their two ladybirds, each on the other side of the window, close, but unable to touch, the spectator consigned ...”

“... from its foundations to its attic, Anne Hathaway’s cottage underwent its own bowdlerisation. Ruskin and Morris watched horror-struck as the zeal of the Victorian restorers gathered momentum (and funds) in the latter half of the century. Gothic Revival architects ‘finished off’ or rebuilt cathedrals, abbeys and churches by the hundred, in France as in ...”

“... the West End. Of course there were examples of avant-garde plays which didn’t go down well, and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance was a notorious box-office disaster. But Arnold Wesker’s Roots (which is cited as having disappointing ticket sales in its first run) did capacity business on its revival alongside the other two plays in the ...”

“... cornfields of the French countryside were planted ‘for their beauty only’. He revered Ruskin for teaching him that only free artisans could create beautiful things. Ruskin later hailed Morris as ‘beaten gold’, while confiding that his own ‘love of Turner, primroses and little girls’ prevented them from ...”

“... be printed beautifully and I’ll sign them all. They’ll be put into portfolios and be sold. John Loker and I got drunk in Ireland last summer and he and I and Nicky Watts decided to bicycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer. I had not ridden a bike since I was a schoolboy, but they were pretty fit. So I ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”