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“... was no real Venice: the real Venice was – and had always been – the Venice of postcards.’ On Mary McCarthy on Venice: ‘Except she’d taken it a step further and said that the thing about Venice was that it was impossible to say anything about Venice that had not been said before, “including this statement”.’ The work of Gilbert and George he ...”

“... an imposing figure, tall, lean tending to cadaverous, with steely grey eyes and a fierce-looking beard. Photographs from his expeditions show him in jungle clearings, hollow-eyed with heat and hunger, wearing a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living ...”

“... in Northern waters ending ignominiously, with the capture of the heavy-gun Renaissance warship Mary Willoughby by the outdated longships of Hector Maclean of Duart off the Shetlands in 1533. Before long, however, one begins to wonder whether Rodger is not falling over backwards to be fair. The Scots, we are told repeatedly, with little evidence to back it ...”

“... might have been jealous. The old man’s skin, his slightly rheumy eye and the white hair of his beard are wonderfully realised. Rubens tends to make use of a repertoire of effective conventions (the marks for an eyelid, folds in the skin, cheeks and so on) and unites them in a springy dance of brushstrokes. Van Dyck observes finer detail, gives more ...”

“... a friend: ‘She had one rare trait that kept me interested: she never spoke of herself at all.’ Mary McCarthy’s assessment of Bishop – ‘I envy the mind hiding in her words, like an “I” counting up to a hundred waiting to be found’ – captures this blend of stealth and appeal, of patience and need. Bishop plays strange games; during hide and ...”

“... a bull of a man whose mobile, red lower lip – pushed forward above an abundant, well combed beard – suggests that he has been caught mid-word. His complaint in a letter to Cosimo de’ Medici – to whom the portrait was being sent as a present – that the treatment of his red coat would have been less sketchy had the painter been paid more ...”

“... taken inside the Scriptorium, Murray looks like the quintessential Oxford scholar, with long beard, academic cap and all the accoutrements of the Victorian sage. But he was an outsider, a nonconformist Scot who left school at fourteen yet somehow managed to learn 24 languages; he had to fight for academic recognition. At various points in the ...”

“... large inexpressive apology for a face’ and a fidgety stage manner, always ‘plucking at his beard’ (he was clean-shaven, so this is metaphorical) and punctuating his punchlines with an interjection of ‘Hey-hey what!’ We see him as Major Sturgeon, a self-deluding old booby in The Mayor of Garrett; as Zachary Fungus in The Commissary; as Dr ...”

“... that in the 1890s Faure sold out his entire Degas holdings.In 1884, Degas painted his friend Mary Cassatt, then in her thirties; she was aghast that he made her look twenty years older. Five years earlier, he had begun painting Madame Dietz-Monnin, a rich boiler heiress married to a prominent politician. But their interchange was called off after what ...”

“... visible. In his youth, Verdi demonstrated his sympathy with Mazzini’s republicanism by growing a beard, and by naming his children after classical republican heroes (though he hedged his bets somewhat by calling his daughter Virginia Maria Luigia, the last two names being those of the Duchess of Parma). The two men met in London in 1847, although little ...”

“... a stroke), but they are united by the bright flossy orange that infuses Lecourt’s beard and burnishes his side, and which constitutes the ageing Sickert’s hair and beard, pouring down his napkin as he sits eating from a bowl of berries in front of a window. This second painting is magnificent. Sickert took ...”

“... born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their marriage, which was sometime in the later 1550s. The fact that John’s father had leased land at Snitterfield owned by ...”

“... barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard’ – and make up a story to connect them. The reader won’t know that you ‘fixed upon the solution first, and then invented a problem to suit it’. This suggests, among other things, that in the world Buchan wrote in it was generally understood to be ...”

“... the challenges that beset a local philologist: ‘With his brown skin, bald pate, and professorial beard, [Jérôme] gives the fascist salute, bumps his head against the light, and sits down. The great scholar … has had a fair number of setbacks during his journey. He tells Griaule and me how he had to traverse a forest on all fours, as the shifta ...”

“... father, or at worst she’d had them only with one’s father; she was somehow virginal, just as Mary the mother of Jesus has to be a virgin, because it makes her so much cleaner. A lack of realism in regard to women is at the core of Peter Sutcliffe’s strange deeds. It is significant that Peter, the firstborn of six children (the second, a boy, died in ...”