“... scene after another, exhibiting that scepticism towards conventional representation that Jenny Turner has suggested is a special feature of contemporary West of Scotland writing. The irony is that as Tom’s escapades become progressively entangled, so he falls victim to his own residual belief in plots and schemes. Death and destruction seem to dog his ...”

“... by armed cavalry resulting in 15 deaths and over 600 injuries.’ A stone memorial designed by the Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller has been commissioned as part of an extensive programme of lottery-funded commemorations to mark next year’s bicentenary. Questions remain about the build-up to 16 August and who was at fault that day. Donald Read’s ...”

“... installations and performances constitute a lurid confessional – had been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The postwar upsurge in self-portraiture is amply documented in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’s anthology of texts and images, The Artist’s Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & ...”

“... as Townley’s marbles were passing into public ownership. Payne Knight’s would soon follow. Sir George Beaumont, patron of Wordsworth and, until they fell out, Haydon, gave his paintings to the new National Gallery in his lifetime. As museums grew and took over from cabinets of curiosities they brought with them the organising systems of curatorship that we ...”

“... that way. Apparently a believer in the notorious ‘thesis’ of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Dies thought that America had been created by a heroic race of Anglo-Saxon explorers and settlers toughened by their conflicts with the natives on the frontier. To speak of the contribution made by labour unions and the importance of ‘ethnic ...”

“... and bills of sale, Marks and his team of researchers unearthed some unexpected gems. The diary of George Hunter White, a dead Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was particularly startling. White had worked as Gottlieb’s fixer in the underworlds of New York and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held ...”

“... study of a Renaissance playwright, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, such a page-turner – a book about the Mountjoys will have to do. But is there really a whole book to be made out of this tiny overlap between the life of our greatest playwright and the domestic squabbles of a family of French expatriate head-dressers? The Belott-Mountjoy ...”

“... himself. Abstract art couldn’t deliver a symbolic charge to match that of Constable or Turner, he complained in 1936. He summarised his change of heart a year later in an essay tellingly entitled ‘Lost, a Valuable Object’. ‘It will be a good thing to get back to the tree in the field that everyone is working for … Get back to it as fact, as ...”

“... and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention ...”

“... different angles on many of the same issues and individuals. Haydon is there, at the Coronation of George IV, a figure in the crowd, describing the ‘silken roar’ as it rose. The Carlyles trail glumly through the chapter on building, hunting for a suitable house. With the exception of a disappointing essay on the theatre the accounts interconnect and ...”

“... experience of hanging paintings will know how the depth in a landscape – the spatial effects of Turner or Koninck – is completely altered once the horizon line is above eye level. The difference to a painting when its frame is changed or even when it is given new partners on the wall is no less extraordinary. It is inconceivable that an intelligent ...”

“... and translations: a frog may become a prince, a typist gets sucked into the seascape of a Turner canvas in her lunch-hour. But what gives her verse its distinctive ring is her way of putting together the humdrum and the elevated in situation and vocabulary. In her poems large events happen to, or inside, people with names like patent medicines; slang ...”

“... Like Trexler, he has been inspired by the approach to ritual of such anthropologists as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, and in any case he knows Trexler’s work. He, too, is interested in the Kremlinologists’ questions: ‘How far out in the lagoon must the senators (and how many senators) go to greet an arriving guest? Should the doge take off his ...”

“... was brought up by his paternal grandparents, while Crippen ‘turned his sights east’. Cora Turner, born Kunegunde Mackamotzki, and later to restyle herself as Belle Elmore, was the daughter of a hard-up German immigrant family in Brooklyn. She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr ...”

“... not only in the Wasteground but also in Freud’s painting of studio rags. It has its own life. Turner was a great painter of litter: the people in some of his foregrounds are a sort of litter, and so are the odd still-lifes he disposed there (it is a feature that Ruskin attributed to a child hood spent near Covent Garden). Freud has discerned this in his ...”