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“... Knight and the Parson begin and end the work, the latter explicitly linking the pilgrimage to St Thomas’s shrine with that other pilgrimage we all have to make to the heavenly Jerusalem? The critic who wants to cast doubt on such points needs to do more than amass facts: he needs to provide us with an alternative theory of the general ‘idea’ of the ...”

“... many incidents in our world. I didn’t find it in yesterday’s newspaper, though. The historian Marcel Thomas uses it in his remarkable book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. Why ...”

“... As the debate about German identity enters a new phase, the work of Marcel Reich-Ranicki acquires a special interest. His career crosses several ideological frontiers: from Pilsudski’s Poland to Hitler’s Germany, from the Communist East to the capitalist West, from traditional Judaism to secular modernism, from radical dissent to conservative orthodoxy ...”

“... Island, later published as Five Years of My Life. It is one of the ironies of the affair, as Marcel Thomas pointed out some time ago, that Dreyfus was less informed than most people of the developments in his case, and the title of Thomas’s book, L’Affaire sans Dreyfus (1961), does not, as it seems ...”

“... This was certainly my experience with this version. I was reading a writer who was recognisably Marcel Proust, and I learned in the process what I should have known already: that Proust’s style, so often a matter of striking analogies, dizzying speculation and an irony which prefers paradox to anything else, travels rather well into English, in a way ...”

“... years of their existence Shakespeare’s sonnets were private poems. Before the London bookseller Thomas Thorpe printed them in 1609 they circulated as manuscripts copied by hand, given from friend to friend. You might have kept yours in an English-made cabinet with drawers. Let’s think about varieties of ‘you’. If you are Helen Vendler you will be ...”

“... of Mercury. How that belief came about, and how Einstein came to demolish it, is the subject of Thomas Levenson’s eye-opening book.Pluto lost its planetary status ten years ago after a group of astronomers, Brown among them, discovered another object of roughly the same size orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune.2 If Pluto was a planet, then so was Eris (as ...”

“... trendies and their visitors – Alfred Stieglitz, Edna St Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill and Marcel Duchamp, among others. She was connected with the Provincetown Players and the Little Review. She had affairs with decadents of both sexes, she wrote about their lives and their haunts in newspapers and published interviews with celebrity-grotesques. Her ...”

“... Marcel Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses ...”

“... to an accredited painting or sculpture); and in the second two instances (by Liam Gillick and by Thomas Hirschhorn), a notion of art as an informal probing into a specific figure or event in history or politics, fiction or philosophy. Although each type of work can be tagged with a theoretical pedigree (in the first case, ‘the gift’ as seen by ...”

“... Richardson’s activism for artists today, it is not yet a model that can rival in its influence Marcel Duchamp’s additions to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, which he made in 1919 to mark the 400th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. Having supplied her with a moustache and beard, he scribbled a coded obscenity across the image. Subsequent versions and ...”

“... down, with various degrees of relaxation and garrulity. A memoir by Proust, instead of a novel by Marcel, is a depressing thought. Such reflections are prompted by Mary McCarthy’s latest book. There was something challenging and stimulating, a bracing offer of American romance, about A Charmed Life, and Cast a Cold Eye, and The Group, and other novels and ...”

“... the Mercure de France gazette, where he became friendly with Mallarmé, Remy de Gourmont and Marcel Schwob, writing hermetic poems and obscure notes on theatre. He also came to know some wayward artists, such as Gauguin, whom he visited in Brittany; Bonnard, Sérusier, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard all chipped in with masks and sets for Ubu roi. Although ...”

“... on the fact that he reintroduced moving sculpture to high culture by inventing what his friend Marcel Duchamp named the ‘mobile’. Yet some of the anxiety signalled by all those inverted commas is still perceptible in this thoughtful and delightful exhibition, the largest ever of Calder’s work in Britain. Calder in the studio (1941). Fernand Léger ...”

“... it was when the Whitney Museum left its old home on New York’s Upper East Side, constructed by Marcel Breuer in blunt granite and concrete in 1966. Its new headquarters, designed by Renzo Piano in elegant steel and glass, opened in Chelsea last May. For many months a cultural beacon in uptown Manhattan was dimmed, and the architectural dialogue between the ...”