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“... the first attempt, he lets it alone. The poem seems to allude to the swans in the second stanza of Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Old Summerhouse’, also in the Faber book: Fall – fall: dark, garrulous rumour, Until I could listen no more. Could listen no more – for beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne; The evening light on the foam, and the ...”

“... Why has it taken a century to bring this about? In giving notice of her death her husband, John Walter Cross, who had married her in St George’s, Hanover Square, scarcely eight months before, alluded to her wish to be buried here. Of her many famous friends, Tennyson, Browning and Trollope would certainly have written to Dean Stanley urging it, and there ...”

“... the first of his books to be written in English, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius. His parents stayed in Germany where, in 1940, soon after his father’s death, his mother killed herself to escape the camps. Pevsner and his family were to remain permanently in this country. The idea ...”

“... admired colleague/bugbear. To Douglas in 1945 he describes him as ‘arse over tippett’; to Walter Legge in 1975 he writes that the success of Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage ‘to me is one of the mysteries of life’. He looks forward to having him stay in one of the houses that he and his wife rent out on Ischia, ‘as I’m very fond of ...”

“... this piece of oral history has been turned by skilful editing into an immensely readable memoir. Walter Gregory’s tale is in many ways archetypal. ‘Setting off for Spain ... I was like a holidaymaker going abroad for the first time.’ He had moved through trade-union activism inexorably leftward via the Hunger Marches into the Communist Party – the ...”

“... and uniqueness, in its very title. Just as David Lodge’s fictitious literary critic, Morris Zapp, hoped to bring criticism to a halt by writing on every conceivable author from every imaginable approach, so Harvey has more than a touch of Life, the Universe and Everything about him, pushing the fuzzy boundaries of his academic discipline to ...”

“... in the 1990s. At the HKW I’d hardly noticed it, eclipsed by other images on Panel 32: jaunty Morris dancers and Dürer’s engraving of dancing monkeys. The real box depicts a curious scene, the Battle of the Trousers, in which seven women fight over a pair of trousers. Warburg related the image back to a passage in Isaiah, in which the shortage of men ...”

“... him, died recently, but is Jill still around? Where’s Shula? What’s with Eddie Grundy? Old Walter Gabriel must be long gone, but what happened to his scapegrace son, Nelson? Are the village shop and post office still open, or does everyone in Ambridge have to drive to Borchester to shop at Tesco? Is The Bull now part of the portfolio of Punch Taverns ...”

“... was taking advantage of him, he’d be gone. Sometimes DiMaggio drove around town after hours with Walter Winchell who, according to his biographer Neal Gabler, was responsible for creating the celebrity industry that helped make DiMaggio a star. DiMaggio’s wattage increased when he started seeing Marilyn Monroe. They met the year after he retired from ...”

“... incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low enough ...”

“... of modernism’. Several years later, in June 1981, he gave warning that the stained canvases of Morris Louis, the leading member of the ‘Washington Colour School’, did not represent the breakthrough that other critics had announced. In May 1983 he declared that Fairfield Porter ‘is going to have to be recognised as one of the classics of our ...”

“... to say, ‘transcending’, as in ‘above’, or ‘in a different realm from’, both. Thus Jan Morris in Conundrum in 1974: ‘There is neither man nor woman … I shall transcend both.’ Even that is not all. If transsexuality is subsumed in the broader category of transgender, as it is for example in the Transgender Studies readers, then there would ...”

“... hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top ...”

“... fuss. It’s odd, considering that Acocella wrote a book on the contemporary choreographer Mark Morris, whose own full-bodied, earthbound style, like his equally full-bodied braggadocio, is reminiscent of Duncan in the extreme: ‘The ghost of Duncan hovers over many of his works,’ Acocella writes in Mark Morris, ‘and ...”

“... like Blake, Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones; and everyone from Whistler to Yeats – there were many – whose imaginations were shifted or shaped by his ideas and practice. Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a ...”