“... decide whether it is doing social history or doing ‘good art’ – the catalogue plumps for the former – and it doesn’t succeed in doing either, all of the time. But it can’t help being interesting. On their first visit to London – they both arrived in 1870, in September and December respectively, and were gone by mid-1871 – Monet, who lodged off ...”

“... in his verse, Trakl was concerned with the irresolvable conflict between idyll and reality, the former conceived as a dream, the latter as fallen, sick and evil. ‘Feeling at moments of deathlike being: all human beings are worthy of love. Waking you feel the bitterness of the world; therein lies all your unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect ...”

“... but full of life and youthful vigour … The number of her children is greater than in any former age.’ And it would still be vigorous in a distant future when travellers from New Zealand, ‘in the midst of a vast solitude’, would stand ‘on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s’. The translator of the ...”

“... Gray went on holiday with his family to the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde. He was 16, a pupil at Whitehill Senior Secondary School in Glasgow, brilliant at art and English but also an awkward boy, asthmatic and eczematous, happier in his head: ‘Had there been television I would have become an addict. In those days my greed for extravagant ...”

“... that her clearing of an apartment between the walls of her house has revealed layer after layer of former inhabitants, and brought to light a ‘bright green lawn under thunderous and glaring clouds and on the lawn, a giant black egg of pockmarked iron, but polished and glassy around which, and reflected in the black shine, stood Emily, Hugo, Gerald, her ...”

“... and complained about having to say grace before meals – not at all the habit of an irreligious former choirboy. He was ready for something new, and when a fresh wave of American composers, influenced by John Cage, arrived at the annual Darmstadt summer school to sample the European experience – and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the ...”

“... and what a difference a few years has made. Cage is now 27 and has left behind any of his former regard for European classicalism. He asks Thomson if he might be interested in writing something for percussion and reports with pride that his group already performs works by key experimental composers such as Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer and Lou ...”

“... Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because as I’ve recently discovered, a source other than Alexander Selkirk’s narrative stirred Defoe’s imagination, and points to the ...”

“... locating their obscurity in the mystery of inwardness. The phrase belongs to William Rubin, the former curator of 20th-century painting and sculpture at MoMA, but the tradition extends back to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Braque and Picasso’s dealer, who offered his own accounts of Cubism in terms derived from Kantian metaphysics. That tradition, Clark ...”

“... the medical director of having aimed too high, too quickly, and of having bewildered his unhappy pupil by allowing him to see his exasperation.’ Publishing that sentence in 1971 doubtless required a cushion of arrogance about Sartre’s own reputation in the year 2096. Yet perhaps this arrogance is not quite what it seems. There are times – many times ...”

“... a different title. Dunning, who teaches sociology at the University of Leicester, was once a pupil of Elias; he remains a devotee, but the focus of his interests is rather different. Elias originally used the history of changing styles in what he calls ‘sport-games’ (defined in a footnote as ‘football, rugby, tennis, cricket, golf etc’) to ...”

“... young man about fifteen years of age, of active, studious and erotic disposition’, a star pupil at his school, who had been much troubled by sexual urges until he discovered to his delight the expedient of masturbation. For about a year he had masturbated two or three times a day. But he then became worried by certain supposed symptoms of ill-health ...”

“... from the blue, so to speak, came the ‘Sixties’, first in Indonesia, then in Chicago. In the former, political polarisation had been steadily deepening in the second half of the Fifties, very much along the faultlines acutely analysed in The Religion of Java. The country’s first and only free elections were held in 1955, and showed a vast new ...”

“... Or admire him more. From the start, Roberts is intent on glorifying George. Gone is the difficult pupil whom J.H. Plumb in The First Four Georges described as ‘lethargic and incapable of concentration’ and ‘who was eleven before he could read fluently and at twenty he wrote like a child’. Instead, Roberts shows us a youth, not brilliant perhaps, but ...”

“... people in various stages of cancer treatment aren’t a group anyone wants to be a part of. My former mother-in-law went to the Bristol centre for alternative cancer therapy and in between juicing fields-worth of carrots, complained until her own death about the letters she regularly received from spouses, informing her that one of their group had ...”