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“... sensitivity of his own circle and the military’s unthinking bravery came to mind when reading Peter Hart’s book. Hart tells the story of the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns – Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1883-85 and 1896-98 – through the eyewitness accounts left by soldiers and journalists, with the aim of ...”

“... story in cadences influenced by the early Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and American writer friends like Hart Crane, but with a dry assurance all his own. The heroics come through all the more powerfully in his highly-polished but economical style. The supreme example can be found in the closing paragraph of the book. It is July 1921; the ...”

“... Telegraph. This bizarre phenomenon is, in rather different ways, a central feature of Duff Hart Davis’s history of the Daily Telegraph under the Berry family, and of the second volume of Michael Wharton’s autobiography. Hart-Davis was a fairly junior member of the Telegraph’s staff for some years. As the author ...”

“... We now have the sixth and final volume of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters. George Lyttelton died on 1 May 1962, thus ending a correspondence which had begun in 1955; the first of the volumes edited by the survivor was published in 1978, the rest have appeared at intervals since. ‘For beginners’, as Rupert Hart-Davis puts it, mindful of those who have had to pick up the thread at some intermediate stage of the correspondence, the editor ‘had been taught by George at Eton, where he was an outstanding teacher and house-master ...”

“... Professor Sir Peter Strawson is properly honoured by the 12 essays written for this anthology. Unlike the papers in some other collections of this kind, most of these are addressed to issues in which Strawson has a serious interest and on which he has done substantial work. It is therefore delightful to find that Philosophical Subjects also contains Strawson’s replies to each of the essays presented to him ...”

“... Among those who appeared there from time to time with a guest evidently not his wife was Rupert Hart-Davis. He was unique among those couples, with their faintly clandestine air, in boldly underlining his presence within the pub by parking outside the entrance a publisher’s van on the side of which was inscribed in large letters: RUPERT ...”

“... tedious to pretend he isn’t’ – and goes on: ‘So famously wrote the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl in Art News, September 1999.’ You have a sense of Dejardin breathing a sigh of relief – not that he can have had any fear that the great art at Dulwich would be sullied. In a world where Jeff Koons operates there is no need for even the most ...”

“... Girl (1907) and Marie (1910) turn from you, even their profiles half lost; the face of Sybil Hart-Davis lying on a bed (she was, the catalogue tells us, an ‘acknowledged beauty’ who was undergoing a rest cure) is so tiny a part of a small picture (about two and a half inches’ worth of a 30-inch canvas) that it is registered in half a dozen elegant ...”

“... behaviour often hovered dangerously close to being that of a paedophile,’ snorted Christopher Hart on the day Brian Gilbert’s movie Wilde was released). Julia Prewitt Brown sees him as a philosophical heavyweight; and celebrates his ‘dodginess’ in order to instal him in a post-dualist tradition of aesthetic theory – a missing link between ...”

“... Exploration (GFOE) have focused on an area between fifteen and twenty miles off Flamborough Head. Peter Reaveley, one of the GFOE researchers, sent me thirteen handwritten pages about his analysis. ‘I derived the weather – visibility, winds, the sunrise and sunset, moon-rise and moon-set, and the magnetic variation,’ he wrote. ‘I built scale models ...”

“... shading in chalk emulate the crispness of his architectural photographs and paintings. In Thomas Hart Benton’s evocations of rural America and its myths, dramatic chalky shadows, elongations and mild distortions of perspective give scenes – an illustration to Frankie and Johnnie, a horse racing a steam engine – a cartoonish swing. Abstract ...”

“... it. He was one of the leadership ‘troika’, with Scargill and the Derbyshire miners’ leader, Peter Heathfield, who became NUM General Secretary under Scargill’s presidency. This arrangement, however, was a fiction: both Heathfield and McGahey were in thrall to Scargill’s unstoppable will. Scargill evidently had a sense of his own mythic status early ...”

“... things is also evident: the pneumatic modelling of the mother’s leg and shoulder brings Thomas Hart Benton’s ruralist mannerism to mind; the fighting children fit with what Ben Shahn was doing at the same time. The material – urban America and its inhabitants – also gives it a distinct, American flavour.By 1947 the drawing regains a childlike ...”

“... for pen to write or paper to record.’ Yet pen wrote it and paper recorded it, even so. Rupert Hart-Davis does not reprint much of the correspondence about Wilde, rightly thinking it available elsewhere, but he does publish the touching letter Max wrote to Robert Ross, Oscar’s premier initiator, when he was in New York with his half-brother, the famous ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”