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“... called Harry Bretton. He is modelled, I would guess, on Eric Gill, for the Life, and Stanley Spencer, for the Work. Musing by the studio window, he considers his place in history: Turner was the greatest English painter, and was safely dead, did not encroach or suggest comparisons. But at the end he had petered out, not grown and gone ahead like Picasso ...”

“... from conversations with her father’s intellectual friends, notably the philosopher Herbert Spencer (with whom she kept up a lifelong friendship), and from her own extensive reading. Good-looking, well-to-do and intelligent as she was in her teens and early twenties, Beatrice might have attracted many suitors. If she did, they find no place in her ...”

“... only give holidays for religious leaders?’ He said: ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you give a half-holiday for Bernard Shaw?’ He leered at me: ‘No.’ The boys went mad. They didn’t know what the Nobel prize was, but they understood that the gurudeb they adored had done something wonderful, as indeed he was always doing. They formed ranks and marched round the asram ...”

“... in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul ...”

“... bright synchronic leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John ...”

“... Place might appear to be very different in his sexual moralism from a Mill or a Holyoake or a Spencer. For example, with characteristic courage and intellectual honesty he launched the world’s first campaign for birth control by artificial means (Mill did follow in his footstops for a while but then nervously and mendaciously repudiated the ...”

“... tables of Las Vegas. TNR would have looked profligate if it had been as well managed as Marks and Spencer. A single copy cost less to produce than you might have thought, but what made this information so startling was the air of extravagance. As Jeffrey Archer might say, it was a problem of presentation. In theatrical parlance, the show was overbilled. The ...”

“... them in the market two or three flowers would scent a room). But florists (and certainly Marks and Spencer) have now bred a strain which has no scent at all except faintly that of pepper. Considering this is a flower which is not much to look at, the whole point of which is its scent, this must be considered a triumph of marketing. 24 January. Somebody writes ...”

“... to turn to the photographs of many of Freud’s sitters (and standers and liers) by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson in Freud at Work (2006). How sleek and erotic the human body really is, you think, and what a very nice colour too. Doesn’t the benefits supervisor look good, and isn’t our queen wonderful for her age? It’s remarkable how few ...”

“... sorts of people turned up for the weekend; the guest list in the interwar years included George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, H.G. Wells, Mary Pickford, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin – even Gandhi. David’s prolonged exposure to celebrities in his childhood meant that they held no fear for him as an adult. Sometimes, when Nancy got ...”

“... Khalloufi in Flat 143 on the 17th floor. She was 52 and worked all the hours she could at Marks & Spencer on Edgware Road. She missed her family all day every day: they lived in Mohammedia in Morocco and she told friends it was sometimes difficult to stick with the life she’d made in England. ‘Khadija was the eldest child,’ her brother Karim told ...”