“... artist’s own photographs. Opposite the mud circles are some large pictures made by Gilbert and George. They also first attracted attention in the Sixties with a new conception of art, but of a different sort. Gilbert and George (we are not told their full names) went in for camp self-advertisement in the manner of Andy ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither ...”

“... depicted them as a literary fab foursome, with Knausgaard the cute Paul and Fosse the spiritual George.) Fosse did once dabble in painting, though his greater passion was for music (‘I came to writing from rock music. A kind of almost imperceptible transition, from the guitar to the typewriter’) and there’s a scene in Septology in which the teenage ...”

“... to cover his armchairs.Worboys describes the ‘Canine Castle’, the dog-dealing emporium of Bill George, a ‘nobby West End butcher’ (‘nobby’ was London slang for those with social pretensions), who was known as the ‘Father of the Fancy’. The Fancy was a loose fraternity of working-class men with a passion for pub-based blood sports. (Charles ...”

“... ignorant and unnecessary: ‘I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art,’ he said to George Moore, ‘and they have not understood ... but among people who understand words are not necessary: you say humph, he, ha, and everything has been said.’ Critics not only rush in where there is nothing to be said, what they do say is glib: ‘Painting is ...”

“... second ‘a’ from his surname in 1909 at the insistence of his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, also a painter, who was ashamed of his nephew’s ‘depraved’ art.) His father, the first Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, was a headteacher, an important local figure in the arch-conservative Orthodox Protestant sect. Mondrian was given his father’s name because he was ...”

“... poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long ...”

“... go … if those millions went – not just the house in the Hamptons, the rooftop suite at the George V in Paris, the account at Asprey’s in London, but most important, control of the Mulholland Trust. That was what Louise prized most; that was the future. Glass spends his happiest moments with his mistress, Alison, a young Irish ...”

“... a collection of miniatures which would include at least one signed example by every miniature painter ever to have worked in the British Isles. Six years later, in 2019, the Grantchester Collection – more than forty British miniatures from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries – was given to the museum by Lady Grantchester, the sister of Sir Peter ...”

“... they are incoherent enough to constitute a problem is always going to be the nice question. Take George Meredith. No one can regard him as a significant thinker now – almost all of his work is long out of print – but for a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th he was the cutting edge, a highbrow’s highbrow, and he ...”

“... because ‘she was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn’t understand.’) H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan subsidised their succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard ...”

“... unwelcome foreign influence, while Queen Anne’s union with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ George of Denmark inspired little enthusiasm. Neither marriage was in living memory but Albert had arrived at a moment when the British were much preoccupied with reconsidering their past. In particular, in the wake of Catholic emancipation and with the Oxford ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... timelessness that makes them oddly available to the poet. In another monologue here, Thwaite makes George Dennis, Consul at Benghazi and a passionate antiquarian, open with words that form a splendidly resonant though decorous conceit for the poetic process itself: Rich bronzes, figured vases, jewellery – Fruits of my labours, subterranean joys: My men sit ...”

“... laugh. I heard later that the two had become buddies and worked together in some way. Perhaps the painter got the chauffeur’s job. While writing this diary I’m thinking about conversation, real and reported, the talk of the young and the old. Art education has hardly anything to do with reading books and being able to write, these silent activities. The ...”