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“... was he more determined to avoid being agreeable than in his late work now at the Tate Gallery. The best group of works on display is the selection from the series of erotic prints made in 1968 and 1970-2. This includes masterpieces (Nos 114 and 148, above all), but also many rehearsals and doodled variations, a higher ratio of unserious work than in his ...”

“... tends to stifle unorthodox intelligence and has little of the sympathy for the past which is the best protector of future needs. We must hope this does not happen at the Tate. The Gallery’s imminent division may be an appropriate moment to review the prehistory of the type of institution, or rather types of institution, which it embodies. This means ...”

“... autobiographical feeling, which is otherwise wholly absent from Machine Dreams. What Phillips does best – and it is a measure of her quality as a writer – is not the description of states of mind and feeling which could plausibly be her own, but the description of those which are most unlikely to be. Implicit in A Late Divorce is the recognition that the ...”

“... men – the males, I mean – who beheld it. Although the early Christians seem to have done their best to destroy them all for ever, there had been so many statues of the nude Venus – hundreds, perhaps thousands of them copied, and still more derived, from Praxiteles’s masterpiece – that a few turned up in the Middle Ages to meet with a very mixed ...”

“... gradually, there’s a limit to everything, I’m afraid, and when I pull myself together as best I can and comfort Papa, it’s a waste of time trying to distract him – that’s the sad thing – he’s becoming more and more unsociable, I think he feels that he’s doing dear Mama a moral wrong of some kind if he allows himself to be distracted and ...”

“... other hand, artists often included details for fun.’ Yet he maintains that they are still ‘the best evidence that we possess concerning the appearance of rooms at the time’. The effect is to make him a little too eager to discern reliable documentation of contemporary practice in works of the imagination. Of a two-part Annunciation painted by Giovanni ...”

“... not least because these pictures do nothing to support her other claims: they are perhaps the best illustrations of ‘honourable hospitality’ and of a ‘gallant retinue’ of servants that it is possible to find. ‘Only recently have the more mundane products of the artisan – furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, textiles and costume – received ...”

“... gives a sympathetic account of Islamic worship in Indonesia, and says that China has ‘one of the best regulated governments in the world’. Amid much sermonising, the book has moments of disorienting candour. Delano recounts falling overboard with five shipmates off the coast of Tasmania. As his arms and legs went numb, he realised with horror that one of ...”

“... and silence together with images would be a feature of many superb passages in Civilisation. His best writing had often owed much to the lecture hall, but the book based on the script for Civilisation exposed the limitations of that text. Nevertheless for many thousands it remained a precious relic of the affable and urbane embodiment of culture who had ...”

“... Harry Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his neck while hunting. Nicholas Heath sits with his arm over the back of his chair; he changed his name to Nicholas Nicholas when he inherited an estate, Boy Court. Mrs Wilmot, painted in riding clothes in the same year, leans forward on a ...”

“... country house, Downton Castle in Herefordshire, which is Classical within and castellated without. Nicholas Penny suggests that Downton is not so much Gothic as Romano-British, and certainly the quest for the truly primitive was to be a driving force behind Knight’s forays into other artistic fields. About the same time, the mid-l780s, he began to collect ...”

“... book.’ If a book can’t be recast in its subtitle as the biography of its subject, the next best thing is for it to appear as a self-help book. Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy, a model of its kind, came out in paperback in the spring. Playing, in a manner of speaking, Achilles to de Botton’s tortoise, ...”

“... on the fly for anonymous intimates’. And they are, on the whole, a diverting enough bunch. The best of the lot, though, is the diary of Samuel Pepys, which a web designer called Phil Gyford has been posting in daily instalments since 2003, using the text already online at Project Gutenberg. It doesn’t exactly not fit in here, which rather puts paid to ...”

“... on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The Wire. But the word that best captures Saif Gaddafi comes from Nicholas Shaxson’s blistering account of the role that tax havens play in international finance. Shaxson doesn’t discuss the Gaddafis themselves, but he does paint a picture of the ...”

“... and rearranged version of Tocqueville’s itinerary, and he does so not in the company of his best friend but of his newly acquired English servant, John Larrit. And, unlike Tocqueville, Olivier falls in love. His romance with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a governor of Wethersfield prison in Connecticut (which Tocqueville also visited), takes on the ...”