“... It goes to show how trying to please the Royal Academy could make an artist lose contact with the grand tradition. Perhaps there are a handful of great Constables among the finished set-pieces – and if there are, one of them is A Boat Passing a Dock, his Diploma work – but by and large this exhibition seems to me to be saying that we have been right about ...”

“... of printed works, paintings and engravings. For instance, she makes much of the fact that while David’s great 1785 work The Oath of the Horatii features three brothers taking an oath in front of their father, a 1793 engraving depicting an oath-taking by three revolutionary soldiers shows no father, only a fallen comrade. The comparison perfectly ...”

“... and generous. Indefatigable, relentless, remorseless, formidable, indomitable: they sound like the Grand Fleet at anchor at Spithead. It is also revealing that Bridges and Normanbrook were relatively long-lived, as were most of the men in this book. Over one-third were born in the 1880s, and 60 per cent were born before 1890. They survived the First World ...”

“... Most country houses were cold, gloomy, eerie, filthy, smelly and insanitary; they were too grand or too small, too plain or too ornate, too shabby or too vulgar; the food was bad, the company often boring, and there was little to do except hunt; and the servants were frequently dishonest or incompetent, while the nannies were sometimes wicked and ...”

“... sings no more.’ For the rest of his life there was intermittent talk of another oratorio, of a grand opera, of a piano concerto, and of a third symphony: but nothing significant emerged. Honours continued to cascade: the Mastership of the King’s Musick, two more knighthoods and a baronetcy (although not the sought-after peerage). But now they were ...”

“... have us believe, by the nubile females of Tahiti, but by sodomy and sexual sado-masochism; the Grand Tour was less a pursuit of foreign culture than of foreign boys, not palazzi but ragazzi even the loss of the American colonies was in part attributable to the fact, alleged by Rousseau, that the commander of the British forces was gay. Although Felicity ...”

“... still that which had evolved during the later part of the reign of Queen Victoria: it was rich, grand, popular, imperial, ceremonially splendid – and also a happy family. The creation of this new-old style of royalty was popularly (and excessively) attributed to Benjamin Disraeli; it was, quite appropriately, a great-power monarchy for the great-power ...”

“... accounts of great crimes plus a mass of ‘occasional’ writings which include his vast Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine. Even as a novelist the scale of his achievement seems scarcely human. The Three Musketeers (1844), the first episode of a saga totalling a million and a quarter words, is as long as five Simenons, yet fills just two of the 310 ...”

“... interviews, Muldoon is not unlike that other cryptographer, Raymond Roussel, who, fearing that his grand schemes would go unappreciated by posterity, told all in Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres. If the puzzles in Muldoon’s work were exhaustible simply by noticing puns like Accutane/Aquitaine, reading him would indeed be as unrewarding as his ...”

“... nowhere in particular. If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased ...”

“... Diebenkorn remembered helping him hang a show of his work in 1947. But like Elmer Bischoff and David Park, with whom he made the turn to figurative painting a few years later, Diebenkorn was asking questions that abstract expressionism couldn’t always answer, even though, as the early works in the show at the Royal Academy (until 7 June) suggest, he was ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott ...”

“... the world from Iceland to India, largely for the worse. Of the rise of industrial tourism as the Grand Canyon became part of the railroad-based restaurant and hotel empire of Fred Harvey. Of the rise of the modern environmental movement; the evolution of ideas about landscape, aesthetics, the public good and the battles between a boom-town, resource-rush ...”

“... one’s looking for evidence of the poetic style in the prose, it’s all here: the bobby-dazzling grand statement; the vague, adult gesture towards philosophy and religion and anthropology; the brow-furrowing reminder of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was ...”