“... It probably doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 ...”

“... to know something about the history of painting. Disappointingly, the English 19th century after Turner seemed to be beneath the girlfriend’s notice, and when we walked around the Russell-Cotes one vacation, I found myself beginning to feel uncomfortable with the derision she clearly felt for most of what was in the museum, however snide I had been about ...”

“... and Girtin (who died young), and eventually reaching a triumphant climax with the work of J.M.W. Turner. The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880, on view at the Royal Academy until 12 April, sets out to recycle this rather tired old story in a manner that remains remarkably faithful to the spirit of the original, despite the occasional difference in ...”

“... picture of the sorts of punishment meted out to new recruits by midshipmen:The Mids, as oft as John drew nearTo stare about him, seemed to sneer,For John as soon as e’er they saw,They knew was but a ‘Johnny Raw’.As Johnny sleeps on deck, his mattress is ‘lugged clean from under him’ by a neatly thrown fish-hook ...”

“... house-guest for most of his life, stands on the pre-professional side of the divide: Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, on the post-professional side. The careers Dorothy Stroud and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and ...”

“... at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also ...”

“... Epithets like ‘disenchanted’ come to mind. That is because I have been reading the latest of John Gage’s books, Colour in Art. Gage’s achievement, here and in Colour and Culture (1993) and its successor Colour and Meaning (1999), is to tinge colour with time like no writer before. His curious and scrupulous mind teases out countless nuances in our ...”

“... the heads of the major German corporations, moved in high circles – from which, as Henry Ashby Turner showed in his excellent study,* they looked down on the Nazis with shuddering distaste and mounting alarm. For their part, Hitler’s economic advisers regarded the world of big business with something between deep suspicion and open enmity. All their ...”

“... and the Emancipator, H.W. Brands has written a dual biography of Lincoln and the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859 led a band of 22 men to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. The divergent paths chosen by Brown and Lincoln illuminate a problem as old as civilisation itself – what is a ...”

“... and glorious’. He leapt like Marcus Curtius into the gulf, taking with him, according to John Barrell, the whole moribund tradition of High Art. Haydon’s status as one of the few literal martyrs to critical theory makes him an appropriate, if somewhat ominous subject for Painting and the Politics of Culture. Here the questions raised implicitly in ...”

“... and a few steps forward would take you into some infinite, radiant void. It’s easy to see why Turner told Ruskin that the skies over Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe. Thanet has two parliamentary constituencies, North Thanet and South Thanet, and a single local council, also called Thanet. Otherwise ‘Thanet’ is a concept linking three seaside ...”

“... in paperback.’ This comment provoked mixed feelings. Still, perhaps there are judges of the Turner Prize who have never heard of – let alone seen a painting by – Ingres.So how did the judges do this year? Well, let us begin by congratulating them: for having chosen a serious book by a serious novelist; for behaving, mostly, with propriety; and for ...”

“... words of Nick Cohen. The best introduction to the history of British Trotskyism is a pamphlet by John Sullivan, a former member of the International Socialists, called Go Fourth and Multiply/When this Pub Closes – that’s ‘fourth’ as in Fourth International.2 Sullivan, who died in 2003, wrote these notes in the 1980s as an affectionate but critical ...”

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”