“... in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George L.K. Morris, artist, art critic and moneybags for the new venture. Despite Morris’s largesse, most of the editors and all of the contributors were at first unpaid. For a young writer, however, appearing in the magazine offered recognition and social ...”

“... touring players, and began her own stage career at the age of six. Ten years later, she married a painter three times her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her ...”

“... vengeance for his misfortunes. A second stab at an artistic future, this time as a portrait painter in Bradford, proved equally abortive: it was characteristic of Branwell’s blighted career that he took up portrait painting at just the point when the industry was being killed off by the daguerreotype. In any case, he spent most of his time engaged in ...”

“... hatred of orchids and his views on Darwin? Why did he praise Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and not George Eliot?), that we need to focus more accurately. We get precious little of that kind of definition from Kemp. Instead, we are presented with a tiring stream of second-hand generalisations. One of the consequences of Kemp’s recoil from morbus Ruskinianus ...”

“... brewer and a fellow Quaker of Lee’s, Parkinson had begun to demonstrate promise as a flower painter. Banks was on the look-out for such talents, to employ on the illustrating of his natural-history collections; and having tried him out on his zoological material, lately brought back from Newfoundland and Labrador, he decided he was a suitable recruit ...”

“... Wyatt and the French poet Nicholas Bourbon; Otto Henry, Count Palatine, and his brother Philipp; George Boleyn, 2nd Viscount Rochford, and William Paget, 1st Baron Paget; and Richard Pate and Hugh Askew. This last lent itself to yet another interpretation of the anamorphic skull: that it was a visual pun on the sitters’ combined surnames (‘Pate ...”

“... he says, to the aesthetic strategy of his father, Walter Tandy Murch, a successful still-life painter, whose pictures set realist studies of everyday objects on distressed canvases, giving them the dreamy immanence of abstraction. Before he began a painting, he would introduce an element of chance by stretching canvases for weeks at a time on the ...”

“... or lived, the experienced or the deeply needed, that a writer or thinker has found words for, or a painter found images for. It’s possible to miss the real in this sense, to get it wrong, or not care about it. As Auerbach thinks Victor Hugo, for example, doesn’t care about it, he just enjoys mixing ‘the sublime and grotesque’. It’s also possible for ...”

“... initial response to Coleman in the jazz world was captured with admirable candour by the composer George Russell, in Shirley Clarke’s documentary Made in America4, as ‘a feeling of apprehension. A feeling of being threatened by this mind of yours.’ Russell confessed to Coleman that ‘when I finally met you … my worst dreams came true. Here was a ...”

“... New York, the South or the West. It has often been said that Isabel Archer is an imitation of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, but it is apparent from all the novels of James which have no resemblance to Middlemarch, and from their Emersonian echoes, that The Portrait of a Lady could have brought the theme of aspiration to the point it does without the ...”

“... Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one. Astronaut Scott shoves ...”

“... book is arranged around a series of intense, often fleeting crushes: a classmate at school, the painter Paul Ehrenberg, his own son Klaus, young men who sit admiringly through his lectures, the architect of his Californian house, sunny boys on the beach, a handsome waiter. These hidden intensities constitute a kind of shadow life, which is strikingly at ...”

“... Day-Lewis began to tire of being in the spotlight, and in 1938 he ‘noiselessly slipped the painter’ of public life, as he put it, retreating to rural seclusion in a cottage in Devon, just inside the border with Dorset. By this point he had been married to his first wife, Mary, for ten years, had two small children, and was growing sexually ...”

“... haven’t even mentioned the earthquake in Peru, the fire at the director’s house, or the blind painter heiress who pays for people to look at the stars), there are extended portions of The Glass Universe which one might fairly term dull. Part of the dullness is unavoidable: meticulously tracking the brightness and position of thousands of stars on ...”

“... One of the most important Kettle’s Yard artists, and one of Ede’s greatest friends, was the painter and poet David Jones, whose long poem In Parenthesis W.H. Auden was not alone in thinking the greatest book about the First World War. It emerged after long gestation. Ede, opening his copy when it arrived one morning in 1937, was at once moved to ...”