“... painting on the other side of the fireplace is Queen Victoria at Osborne, a copy of Landseer by Gilbert Sprague (the original is in Osborne House) and, if anything, even gloomier than the original. Here again is John Brown – the faithful Highland ghillie – holding the reins for Victoria, who is sitting side-saddle on a pony, reading a letter (more are ...”

“... 1948, Gear, then based in Paris, had exhibited with Réalités Nouvelles and, along with Stephen Gilbert, had also become one of only two British founding members of the CoBrA group, whose significance has been aptly characterised by Chris van der Heijden: ‘in the midst of the darkness of the Cold War the colours of CoBrA take on a special significance ...”

“... and a love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... Ernö Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased ...”

“... a baby from my parents’ generation, although he was born in 1933, twenty years after my father. Gilbert Glück, born Paris, 19 January 1935, and deported 21 August 1942, Convoy 22 (1000 people, among whom there were 293 boys and 318 girls; 817 of the passengers were gassed on arrival; no females and seven men survived), is pictured holding a large hoop and ...”

“... new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash. But really, as Pinfold goes on to say, ‘most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters ...”

“... new annotators don’t mention this – Gifford gives no source – and quote instead from Stuart Gilbert, who found in a book called Les Tatouages a record of a prostitute in Naples who had a tattoo on her stomach of a naked woman on whose nipple was seen the numbers 16 and 6, ‘which in Neapolitan slang signify anterior and posterior ...”

“... sports’ had only been a prelude to the appearance of ‘a large, gay, rotund figure dressed in a white uniform … It was the famous, fantastic Goering.’ Then, after the Horst-Wessel-Lied (‘which had a gay lilt’), the audience was electrified. ‘Hitler was coming! … One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature: I was more thrilled ...”

“... How to identify which was which? The secrets that had to be kept close would then be what Gilbert Ryle – coincidentally, writing at exactly this time – called ‘knowing-that’: facts, theories, propositions, even tables, graphs, drawings. Or was the key element procedural or practical knowledge – in Ryle’s vocabulary, ‘knowing-how’: the ...”

“... sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate speculator’s wife because, she ...”

“... Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante. Like any good seductress, Todd was an opportunist. She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen ...”

“... I doubt if she’ll be pleased.Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty alcoholic; his mother, a dim-witted teenage bride, didn’t want him and late in her ...”

“... writer, earlier than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ‘the artistic life’ to the naive heroine, but whose antiquarian talent proves in fact confined, in a penetrating image, to tracing the common coinage of ...”

“... sculptors (also collected by Saatchi), on established Turner-winning Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his ...”