Search Results

“... the promised projects had failed to materialise. Insiders leaked emails and financial documents to Simon Clark and Will Louch at the Wall Street Journal, who started to publish evidence of malfeasance. US federal prosecutors brought fraud charges against Naqvi, and in April 2019 he was arrested on disembarking from a plane in London. He paid £15 million ...”

“... In part ten​ of Civilisation, Kenneth Clark turned his attention to the Enlightenment, the age of the great amateurs. These were men ‘rich and independent enough to do what they liked’, who nevertheless did things which required considerable ability, men like Lord Burlington, the architect earl. A connoisseur, an ‘arbiter of taste’, Clark explained, ‘the sort of character who these days is much despised ...”

“... entirely on the failure of the group’s revolutionary ambitions. This is why, according to Simon Sadler, it is important to recognise that the demands the Situationists made were, above all, aesthetic. The politics worked out in the beautiful silver-plated issues of the Internationale situationniste are drawn in almost equal measure from Henri ...”

“... had only been waiting for a signal to pour into the streets and head for the palaces. Christopher Clark uses a metaphor from nuclear physics for the way the revolution accelerated: From the beginning of March 1848, it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions as a linear sequence from one theatre of turbulence to the next. We enter the fission phase, in ...”

“... six months in order to deliver its coup de grâce. A lost belt presents opportunities for farce in Simon Lewis’s ‘Two Holes’, but it falls short of the mark, and its comedic pay-off is unearned; in a similar vein, Tony White’s story of a love-lorn husband resolutely missing the point by planning to send his wife a sonnet every day for a year fails to ...”

“... the unpardonable lapse of taste of examining the period in between, when Berenson, as Lord Clark pointed out some years ago, did nothing but authenticate. Not only does she presume to scrutinise his dealings with the unsavoury Joseph Duveen – a partnership which began in 1907 and continued for thirty years – but she also attempts (a little ...”

“... That snobbishness hasn’t disappeared. Take Michael Jopling’s celebrated remark, quoted by Alan Clark: ‘The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture.’ Willie Whitelaw is quoted as saying that he is the kind of man who combs his hair in public, though that sounds too mean for Willie. There are also the big political ...”

“... romanticism’, his latent racism and misogyny, Campbell now reveals him in his later Simple Simon aspect, as a fauxnaif ‘crazy dumbsaint’ Knight of Oblivion. The Kerouac of the later parts of Campbell’s version is all but finished as a writer, even before his central work has been published: a foolish, besotted, lost hero ‘to whom thoughts ...”

“... is the kind of thinking involved. Balfour-Paul is very good at giving an idea of how dyers think; Simon Garfield is not so successful with his organic chemists. Mauve is about William Perkin, and about what followed from his discovery. As it is possible, at a pinch, to trace the achievements of all the chemical industries which once used coal and now use oil ...”

“... of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist anthropology (and zoology) of the first Socialist Sects. The web was more and more complex – some would say tangled. It ...”

“... exhilaration of extended tabla solos. Shankar enjoyed listening to the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin, who he said reminded him of an old-school jazz singer like Bessie Smith, but was saddened by Hendrix and The Who, with their sacrilegious destruction of instruments. ‘I am immediately repulsed by anything ugly ...”

“... Madame Moitessier arrived at the National Gallery in 1936 (a coup for its young director, Kenneth Clark), one critic protested: ‘Surely the little finger of a normal right hand should be articulated to a knucklebone and not drop from the off-side of the metacarpus.’ But as that early study shows, if you give the three remaining fingers their full ...”

“... game called Masterpiece, and it was small, blurred and usually incomprehensible, even when Kenneth Clark was standing in front of it sounding enthusiastic on television. Why was a naked man wrapped in a curtain jumping over a wagon from behind a tree, twisting his head oddly as he did so to look towards a girl who seemed to be pushing an imaginary door in an ...”

“... hoarding books rather than cash, and the novel’s excellent jacket-picture by Emma Chichester Clark has a promising glimpse of him peering at a tome, surrounded by towers of unsorted volumes which wait their places on the empty shelves in the gloom beyond. Unfortunately Lamming’s prose never quite measures up to that picture: the book-hoarding ought to ...”

“... she has been drawn to the recently published memoirs of the Essex clergyman, the Rev. Andrew Clark, and quotes extensively from that admirable record (Echoes of the Great War). One chapter deals with the unhappy French countryside, which for four years was methodically (and, from the South Coast, audibly) reduced to mush. Sir William Orpen, visiting the ...”