Search Results

“... of Wales, but like many of his poems it does not survive. When Arthur’s death transformed his pupil’s prospects, Skelton found himself relegated to a rectorship in Norfolk. Some of his poems embed themselves in the locality: his diatribe Ware the Hawk, against a neighbouring vicar whose hawk pursued its prey into his church at Diss; and Phillip ...”

“... influence and wealth. Worse still, it made him complicit with the worsening abuses of power by his former pupil, including Agrippina’s murder. When he tried to retire in 62 ad, whether through fear, compunction or the pressure of his schizophrenic existence, Nero wouldn’t let him: he was too useful as a way of legitimising the regime. Only when he was ...”

“... Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo, were sculptors who also ran painting workshops. Verrocchio’s pupil Leonardo da Vinci was a sculptor as well as a painter (although all that remains of his three-dimensional work is the remarkable bronze of a horse and rider in the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts). Michelangelo was trained by a painter, Domenico ...”

“... Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

“... such as Bacon or Freud and, more particularly, by the higher pitched, punchier art of his pupil Euan Uglow. A few portrait commissions remain on public view in contexts of fusty formality, but for the most part the Coldstreams are for the storeroom. This, Laughton reckons, is an unworthy coda to the former hegemony ...”

“... tutor when he entered Eton as a boy, and at Eton still until he died in the eighth year of his old pupil’s Provostship. Luxmoore was austere but tolerant, and both qualities are evident in his account of a Christmas spent at King’s a few years before Monty’s attaining the headship of the college: I am spending Christmas in this wonderful place with ...”

“... aesthetic example to their neighbours. The drawing-room gatherings and expensive clothes of their former lives now seemed ‘as dross’. On a January morning the following year Born wrote to her cousin that she had ‘made the floor of my room shine with extra brightness’ using ‘beeswax, turps and elbow-grease’. She was excitedly preparing for a visit ...”

“... crossed the Channel: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, George Trevelyan, Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves (a former pupil) and Rupert Brooke (a contemporary at Magdalene). Another friend, Lytton Strachey, was renowned for his obsession with Mallory’s good looks (he credited him ‘with the face of a Botticelli’). In April 1915, Mallory wrote to A.C. Benson, his ...”

“... the camps found it hard to speak about their loss. In Germany, the 1964 trial of Robert Mulka – former adjutant to Commandant Rudolf Höss – and 21 others for crimes committed at Auschwitz enabled a new generation to confront the past, but in Britain and the United States it was only some years later that it became possible to broach the ...”

“... and social goals of history become either unrealisable or shallow. When Francis Fukuyama, a former pupil, of de Man’s, wrote his article ‘The End of History’ amid the events of 1989, he must have been ironically aware that his mentor and his mentor’s friends had been pouring out books for a quarter of a century on another time history ...”

“... to move on. In the early months of 1924 he took up with Gertrud Kolisch, the young sister of a former pupil, and entered the sunniest span of his career. He was invited to tour Mussolini’s Italy by the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche, and in Florence made friends with Puccini: despite the aesthetic gulf between them the two men held each other in ...”

“... inquiry, bigger and certainly more inflammatory, as a result of his decision to select Clarke, a former head of counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Police, to lead it. Clarke’s report was published just as Gove himself was unexpectedly moved from the DfE last July. It found lots of things out of order at schools in East Birmingham – poor financial ...”

“... biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after ...”

“... plinth. To most outside the embattled ranks of Anglo-Catholicism Oddie’s efforts to depict the former Dean of New College even as a figure more sinned against than sinning is bound to smack of special pleading. If ever a man brought his troubles on himself, Gary Bennett did. For his story is not, as Oddie would have us believe, that of a man who spoke the ...”

“... also intertwined were chiefly trained: Hector Boece, John Mair or Major, and Major’s most famous pupil, George Buchanan. If the pitch and intonation of Scottish intellectual life have always seemed somewhat alien to English ears, the influence of these Continental schools must not be forgotten in accounting for it. Of the three, the one who has left ...”