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“... was indifferent; Tolstoy denounced the Ring cycle as ‘counterfeit art’; a discombobulated Ruskin left a performance of Die Meistersinger claiming the music was ‘clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with ...”

“... like the Loshes who took ideas seriously and were inclined towards radicalism. Sarah’s father John, born in 1757, was the eldest of four remarkable brothers. Their wealth came partly from land and later from the alkali works the family developed at the Walker colliery. The extended network of cousins and relatives by marriage (a number of whom were the ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... in contemporary hen-house design, as if this were House and Garden rather than Farm-Poultry. John Evangelist Walsh has remarked that it was in these stories, published ten years before his first book of poems, that Frost had his first successes in capturing the flavour of real speech, voices which he later insisted poetry couldn’t do without. ‘Write ...”

“... Gertrude Jekyll lived to see the first waves of the tide of gentility that swept over Surrey until John Betjeman could not look at one of Miss Jekyll’s beloved rhododendrons without thinking of a stockbroker. Less intellectual, in many ways less effective than Morris, she was, nevertheless, in one sense nearer the heart of the issue. In her work as a garden ...”

“... of the vertiginous prospects opened up behind, beneath and before us by students of fossils. Ruskin claims to hear the clink of the geologists hammer in the cadences of the Scriptures. ‘There where the long street roars, hath been/The stillness of the central sea./The hills are shadows and they flow,’ Tennyson reflects. One of Pater’s ...”

“... all the same. It may derive from Updike’s own experience as a practitioner. He studied at the Ruskin in Oxford and is therefore expert enough to set down a splendidly thorough account of artistic ineptitude: ‘As those who have both drawn and written know, the problems of definition differ radically. A table or a person becomes in graphic representation ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... forces to scientific examination. Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the ...”

“... To have been born into a world of beauty, to die amid ugliness is the fate of all us exiles.’ Ruskin would have told him that much of the ‘world of beauty’ had gone long before he was born. One reason for travelling through your own country is to document visual atrocity and human deprivation, and Waugh’s sense of a better world that is lost can be ...”

“... a damsel in distress in Wimpole Street. It is odd that Girouard should instead have chosen John Millais’s scarcely romantic and in any case slow-paced deliverance of Effie Ruskin as the great Victorian instance of knighthood in action. Browning, it must be remembered, went on to reflect himself and his heroic ...”

“... version, above, the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations (by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text, they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect) intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to find out what is ...”

“... Layard, helped to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty of ‘serious scholarly attention’. As for the ‘full social and historical context’, that was ...”

“... I would feel uncomfortable. Philology, according to the OED, was first used in English by John Skelton in the 1520s of ‘the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative and critical aspects of literature’. The earliest usages of the word philologist in the 17th century are often qualified by an adjective of praise ...”

“... the big deal about precision as an end in itself? As Stoppard archly knows – and as Arnold and Ruskin and Pater and Wilde and Housman knew in rather different ways – so much hangs on the question of accuracy. Or what fantasies of accuracy are used to do. ‘ “To see the object as in itself it really is”, has been justly said to be the aim of all true ...”