“... with a letter intercepted by MI5, and what they made of it. It was sent, in December 1932, by the painter Clifford Rowe to the industrial designer Misha Black; in it Rowe suggested the formation of an ‘artist revolutionary union’ in London that might be able to serve alongside those formed in the Soviet Union. This letter, Friend suggests, was the ...”

“... to the whimsical. An instance of self-aware pseudomorphism is a gallery curated by the American painter Amy Sillman; titled ‘The Shape of Shape’, it is a mélange of 71 works, some old, some new, by 71 artists, some familiar, some not, that feature mostly abstract forms suggestive of body parts. An example of effective anachronism is the inclusion of ...”

“... with various displays of grossness; later on, he detested his son’s chosen mate, Gala. The painter was to take elaborate revenge in a series of works about an ogre called William Tell, Dalí’s variation on the Oedipus complex in which the father takes the active role. But it was the more obvious 1929 sketch of the Sacred Heart, on which was scrawled ...”

“... talented artists until their vessels were scuttled by fame, or barnacled with fame-seekers. The painter John Minton had been boyish and agreeable. Maclaren-Ross remembered him in Soho, about the time Muriel Belcher opened her place. He saw him dancing down Dean Street to the Colony, ‘his long loose-jointed figure in a sort of petty officer’s pea jacket ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... only Wagner can be said to have secured an ‘ism’ (following her trip to Weimar in 1855, George Eliot referred to the ‘propaganda of Wagnerism’). The closest precedent might be Byronism, a similar conflation of radical politics, sex and celebrity that overwhelmed existing artistic divisions. By the late 1800s, Wagnerism had become a pervasive ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the idea of heroic sacrifice, and the first money he earned ...”

“... wit in verse. After flowery and carefully euphonious Edwardian fine writing, the paragraphs of a George Moore or of Chesterton himself with his well-turned paradoxes, Lewis’s style – expressed by the apparent lack of any – might indeed have seemed the thing. ‘The style is not, as it looks, artless, but the product of careful design, devised as the ...”

“... have relished. There is, for instance, Roger Lonsdale, presenting with due flourish a work by the painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson the elder, and illuminating Richardson’s own little-known life (down to a new birth-year) as well as the career of his young friend Pope. Lonsdale never writes without managing to teach one something, a critical ...”

“... Taylor sums it up) ‘boyfriend a is a peer of the realm while boyfriend b is a penniless painter.’ This, Taylor writes, was ‘the war-era bohemian life in which glamour and sophistication and something very close to poverty [were] inextricably combined’. All four at some point shared a bed with Lucian Freud; at least three of them slept with ...”

“... was a global player of sorts. Wolf placed two major agents in the US (‘Piano’ and ‘Painter’, both now dead, and unnamed here), but admits that his people never really got the hang of working in America. Greater success was achieved in recruiting US servicemen in Germany with access to signals intelligence, and in turning the CIA’s East ...”

“... all the more poignant. If you wanted an example of non-alienated labour, you looked to the poet or painter. The work of art itself could be seen as a peaceable utopian commonwealth, its various elements blended into unity without violence to their particularity. Like the good society, it combined freedom and community. The aesthetic was the last refuge of ...”

“... better get me a grey frieze livery and a straw poke, such as my aunt’s charity children wear.’ George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth is sour because it looks as though she will have to support her family by teaching the daughters of a bishop, but most would have shared her depression at the prospect. The efforts of the governess were exploited and ...”

“... Gallery, then often still attributed to Giorgione, she refers to its possible influence on George Frederic Watts in the 1860s and Edward Burne-Jones in the 1870s. It also influenced Pater’s own fiction, as readers of Marius the Epicurean (1885) will appreciate: the young knight Cornelius tries on his armour ‘and as he gleamed there amid that old ...”