“... Times notice was headed ‘A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum’, and if the painters had read Guston’s 1970 notebook the betrayal would have seemed complete. In an entry made at the time of the exhibition he wrote: ‘American abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to ...”

“... of six the children enjoy Beowulf and Greek myths. At eight they devour Dickens. By 12 they have read most of Shakespeare. Television is anathema to them; audio, video and disco just Latin verbs. ‘I hear, I see, I learn.’ It would make the ideal motto for the Anderson family. Painted by Moy (in Latin, of course) on a colourful escutcheon depicting three ...”

“... her hip, are put into poses which suggest informality, amiability and mutual comfort. Mr and Mrs Peter Perez Burdett are altogether stranger; the portrait Wright painted as a gift hadn’t, until now, been outside Prague since the subjects’ daughter took it there on her marriage. The husband – young, lively, in casual bright clothes – contrasts with ...”

“... of taste seem an absurd condescension. Even Pop Art was still fine art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of ...”

“... artists like Vermeer and, indeed, de Hooch. If you go to Dulwich, and take the catalogue off to read by the tea tent you are struck by the redundancy of the plentiful colour reproductions: you have, after all, recently seen the pictures and can easily return to them. Curiously, it is almost as if the author agreed, for each entry begins with a paragraph of ...”

“... as indignant and extravagantly phrased as those from outraged fathers and anxious slave owners. He read the first draft of the Nicene Creed during one of his many attempts to reach consensus among the bishops. As Potter points out, this means that the Creed, a version of which Christians still recite every Sunday, could be seen as ‘the best-known utterance ...”

“... most amazing war picture ever taken’. The caption to the full-page portrait of the photographer read ‘The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa’. Life also ran the story and described how Capa had crossed the river Segre with the troops the night before the action. During the next few years Capa filed pictures of war and its aftermath from ...”

“... is choosing her words carefully, aware that someone may be listening behind the open door. As you read, you can’t help dreading the aggression hidden in the next unmarked phrase, a dread that reproduces the migrant’s sense of unlocatable threat: the feeling that every siren dopplering down the street is potentially calling for you. After the daughter and ...”

“... In the first chapter of Peter Redgrove’s novel we are introduced to a poet named Guy, who is about to read aloud some poems he has written about bees. He breaks off a meandering introduction to tell his audience: I can see you saying, ‘Why doesn’t he keep to the point?’ But not keeping to it, is the point ...”

“... Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckledand foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckonme to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes ...”

“... Bacon as menacing as ever. He has not petered out, and even his critics admit his achievement. Peter Fuller who ‘turns away from Bacon’s work with a sense of disgust and relief’ also describes him as ‘a good painter, arguably the nearest to a great one to have emerged in Britain since the war’. And greatness is, Bacon says, the only thing worth ...”

“... I had never heard at all. Hopkins was a poet I was particularly attached to, and for years I had read very little about him that was not clotted and professionalised. But Paulin’s piece was, I thought, unusually compelling. Using a vocabulary that was both political and extraordinarily sensitive to poetic technique, Paulin resurrected Hopkins from three ...”

“... likeness. In public, Francis Pattison, who remained on good terms with Eliot, always denied having read the book, but Dilke stated plainly, on his wife’s authority, that ‘the religious side of Dorothea Brooke was taken by George Eliot from the letters of Mrs Pattison,’ and that Casaubon’s letter proposing marriage to Dorothea ‘at the beginning of the ...”

“... you would write chronicles or treatises or poems in that language, not in the local vernacular. Peter Godman’s anthology of poems of the Carolingian period provides some remarkable instances of this international character of Medieval Latin. Here in the eighth and ninth centuries, if ever, is a true European literature. Among the poets associated with ...”

“... from Thomas Shapcott (who may be Australian – we aren’t told) and from Peter Bland (probably, by the same token, a New Zealander); and from U. A. Fanthorpe (two). One of the Fanthorpe poems gets, reasonably enough, the third prize of £500, Bland gets £250, Eaton, Ditmas and Beeson get £100 apiece. Below these again, by my ...”