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“... they came to have their portraits painted ‘in little’ by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, who lived and worked on Gutter Lane for 35 years. If you were very posh or very rich Hilliard came to you, but his bread and butter was what he called ‘common’ work – in other words, doing portraits of commoners – and this more middling ...”

“... mouse-wouse!’ The Shine screenplay makes the connection for us. Gay piano teacher Ben Rosen (Nicholas Bell), in a scene cut from the film, describes David’s father, Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), as a ‘poor man’s Leopold Mozart’. Pianospeak, we’re to believe, indicates mental illness. Mozart was insane, according to a playwright too invested in ...”

“... anguish at being deprived of his legacy on his father’s death in 1421. Nonetheless, he had the best education money could buy, first under the leading humanist schoolteacher Gasparino Barzizza between 1416 and 1418 in Padua, where he became familiar with Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel frescoes, painted a century earlier; many of his ideas about painting were ...”

“... Hope’s fastidious reviews to the scrappy bombast of Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939* makes me wonder for a second why I’m being hesitant about knitting together Hope’s short pieces for a book. And yet, who would want to be remembered for less than his best, and how would Anthony ...”

“... devoutly to be wished. Johnson is not indefatigable compared to Levin, but he is, in the best sense, prosaic. He likes how elections feel, out on the streets. He inhabits the cruddy world of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is ...”

“... the absence from paradise. The words I have just quoted are the last words of the first volume of Nicholas Boyle’s biography of Goethe. The date is June 1790, and other things have been happening in Europe, to which Boyle immediately turns in his new book. Germany at this time was far from a nation state – it was a confusion of duchies and principalities ...”

“... to the lord mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of London: We command you that you have the body of Nicholas Lowe, who is detained in our prison under your custody, as it is said, together with the cause of his detention, by whatever name the aforesaid Nicholas is charged, before us at Westminster on Saturday next after eight ...”

“... Our nightmare of total transparency conflicts with our dream of being entirely known. So we do our best to have it both ways. Hugging our right to silence close to us, we sally forth into the world in search of friends, lovers, therapists. Nagel speaks of intimacy as ‘a partial lifting of the usual veil of reticence’. Friendship and romantic love operate ...”

“... death agony Roussel had ejaculated. (The hotel, according to its website, is still ‘offering the best of service to discerning visitors to Palermo since 1874’.) Perhaps these are trivial matters; except that they were not for Roussel. A person who had believed for so long in his own literary immortality was in the end fearful not so much of dying as of not ...”

“... Hotel, Love Story – which is read by everyone for a while and then sinks into limbo. Have such best-sellers anything in common? Obviously they are not – like War and Peace, say – hardy perennials. Their appeal is to something specific in the temper of the time. Going with that, perhaps, is a capacity to have their cake and eat it, and to give their ...”

“... reduced the master’s subtle and varied manner to a set of imitable and parodiable mannerisms, at best merely clever, at worst tediously posturing and repetitious. How best to advise the English reader wishing to get the measure of Petrarch has always been problematical. Happily, these two new books should change that. It ...”

“... opposition. He was a friend to Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay and many of the Pléiade company; to Nicholas de Grouchy, the editor of Aristotle, Elie Vinet the mathematician and cosmographer, Peter Ramus, Henri Estienne, his collaborator and printer in a variety of works, and to Julius Caesar Scaliger, who held him in high regard. As these connections ...”

“... covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though not, as I hear it, self-vaunting) ‘Je n’ai rien négligé.’ But the rose on the unlovely pebble also reminds me of Poussin’s habit of bringing ...”

“... of his life in England. The influence of their work slowly began to be felt: court artists such as Nicholas Hilliard were shaped by their admiration for Holbein, and by the 1570s refugee artists from the Netherlands were inspiring many now unknown English painters to attempt greater tonal subtlety and more complex compositions. Native practices began to merge ...”

“... The theme of Britain under Nazi occupation has already produced a shelf of fiction, much the best being Len Deighton’s SS-GB. Now the idea can be extended, made more topical. This new satire by Kingsley Amis – a ‘melodrama’, as he calls it – treats of England under the Russian boot, something worth paying a high price in blood to avoid (and ...”