“... of an oddity. Unlike the other masterpiece hunters of the late 19th century, Huntington was more of a taxonomer, acquiring hundreds of thousands of objects to create ‘a broad outline without duplication’ of Spanish and Hispanic art and culture. He wanted, as he put it, to ‘capture the soul of Spain in a museum’ and, in May 1904, he founded the ...”

“... Benjamin, but it was clear that for Berger the difficulties of a painter of our time involved more than lack of technique or talent. It was a matter of how art meshed with the other cogs in the machine of history. Picasso could be a genius without being a great painter, if the possibility of greatness was precluded by the nature of the world he had been ...”

“... past to assume, first, that we can confidently identify something called lesbian sexuality (or, more generally, homosexuality); second, that this form of sexuality has always existed (largely repressed and hence mute in earlier ages, now in the 20th century explicit and manifest); and consequently, third, that it has a history? We can get a sense of what is ...”

“... having stripes affords camouflage and, all else being equal, tigers that are camouflaged have more viable offspring than tigers that don’t. But bear in mind that the adaptivity of a phenotypic trait is its contribution to fecundity in the environment in which it was selected; not (or not necessarily) in the environment that it currently occupies. A ...”

“... escaped. With battlefields turned beneath the plough, the countryside entered an era of more fundamental change prompted by improved communications, as illustrated by canals and turnpikes, and by the redistribution of land through Parliamentary enclosure. Side by side with these changes, the country mansion came into its own, with landscape ...”

“... or to The Archers. The self-awareness of the novel in regard to its public is curiously subtle. Thomas Mann and Arnold Bennett would have taken it for granted, like Scott, that though their reconstructions might not appeal to everyone, they would be read by a complete cross-section of the reading public, from the discerning connoisseur to those who were ...”

“... marble to evoke the canyon of the Sutjeska River in Bosnia-Herzegovina (the site of one of the more famous of Tito’s offensives). The Neoclassical Foreign Ministry across the road is hidden by scaffolding. On the pedestrianised Knez Mihajlova Street, the American and French cultural centres are still vandalised and daubed with anti-Nato graffiti, but ...”

“... they dart under canopies of fallen leaves. Fish sleep with their eyes open: not our kind of sleep, more like our kind of daydream. Awake but not awake, just like me; living to eat and conserve energy, just like me; devoid of answers, just like me; comfortable in their doom, just like me. These days goldfish are my homies.Fishing is an occasion for hope. In my ...”

“... to that history. Still, if these pictures do seduce, they may also impel the smitten to discover more about the object of desire. For the intellectually curious the footnotes are a more than adequate bibliography. Mr Platt, I believe, claims far too much. ‘Life-styles,’ he says in his Preface, are my subject, and ...”

“... composer’s visits to London between 1958 and 1965, occupy over half the book. Although there are more sketches than seems necessary, they capture marvellously the hunched, almost repressed posture characteristic of the composer (even as a younger man), and thus lend support to some of Keller’s psychological hypotheses. This physical attitude is all the ...”

“... There were​ more than a million women in early 16th-century England, yet we remain obsessively interested in the life and death of just one. The usual, if sensational, explanation is that Anne Boleyn was a woman of unconventional but irresistible charm, with exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes ...”

“... Few presences were more imposing in postwar poetry than that of T.S. Eliot, but from his eminence as the Pope of Russell Square, Eliot has now shrunk to something more like a holy ghost. Pound’s right-wing unpleasantness, because so deranged, seems somehow more forgivable, to the huddled ranks of Poundians at least ...”

“... historian, journalist, MP and PM, drinking, smoking, eating and tirelessly talking his way through more than fifty years of politics, statecraft and war. Yet these two supreme egotists became as close friends as their personalities permitted, and it may be argued that anyone who is thankful that Britain ended the Second World War on the winning side should ...”

“... little legally significant about it. Moore dedicates the book to her parents ‘in celebration of more than 50 years of marital harmony’, but what follows is a survivor story: what does it signify if you haven’t got a man, so long as you don’t marry a sociopath? Mary Bowes was the richest heiress in 18th-century Britain, ‘perhaps even ...”

“... as Giovan Battista Marino soon began to twist admiring conceits around this startling immediacy. More verbal wrapping has swathed Caravaggio since he returned, in the 1950s, to the art-historical spotlight after three centuries in the wings. But commentators are all on the back foot. We might argue that having trained in the north, Caravaggio learned ...”