“... that they have been made aware of a personality. The image creates the illusion that you can read a soul. There is also, of course, style: not of the painting but of the person painted – a personal service within the painter’s gift. Titian offered his male subjects a new authority and presence: he could show a man relaxed, but potentially energetic ...”

“... of some truth that has been confabulated?) Only when they are dead are the letters allowed to be read. That is the meaning, the weight of having the last word. Something happened, or someone did something – and those of us who are innocent will have to remain in ignorance, never knowing who did what. The accusation doesn’t go away. Nor can the magnitude ...”

“... unlike most psychologists, he is at home in biology, philosophy and mathematics and he seems to read more deeply in these subjects than he does in psychology. Someone like this creates a demand for a middleman, a person who will boil the master down and explain his achievements clearly and concisely. Many people have tried to do this, but though they often ...”

“... and immortalised his title of Imperial Adjutant on the obelisk which now stands outside St Peter’s; in 29 he was made Prefect of the new province, the most glamorous and (so long as Rome depended on Egyptian corn) the most politically sensitive in the Empire. Octavian no doubt expected loyalty and discretion from the man he had made. But Gallus could ...”

“... there is no convincing science of physiognomy, and plenty of evidence that people do sometimes read things into pictures that are demonstrably not there. In looking through new photographs, one wonders whether, for all the miles of film exposed every day, we will have anything to match the record of the world which is preserved in prints from the first few ...”

“... works and on a study of their history. There was restrained passion in this labour: ‘I had read Nietzsche for years and consistently found him to be the most stimulating and most infuriating of writers.’ Schaberg’s book is a deliberately narrow study, rich in its suggestiveness, self-indulgent in its minutiae, regrettable in its flaws. He is ...”

“... can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been thinking about for a long time. In 1979 he published his first novel, Kindergarten, a short and desolate work which won the Hawthornden Prize. A meditation on ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the grimmest of tales, Kindergarten describes a world ...”

“... and suspicious of New Deals and other easy offers of a lift. But real individualists don’t read guidebooks, and Frost wasn’t writing them. On receiving the Emerson-Thoreau medal in 1958, he thanked his hosts with the mildly insulting remark that no one could really be an Emersonian: ‘Emerson disabused me of my notion I may have been brought up to ...”

“... of insulin therapy to the research of Banting and Best. Bliss records that Charles Best read Paulesco’s publication and indexed it in his file. Best seemed however, to have misunderstood Paulesco’s paper, to which he made an inaccurate reference in his own first publication of 1922. When Paulesco came to hear of Banting’s work he wrote to ask ...”

“... his life will be grateful to Brendan Gill. He relieves us of doubts about our intelligence. As you read the Autobiography much does not quite fit. The feeling grows on you, as it must on the victims of confidence tricksters, that you cannot follow the story because you are stupid. Gill makes it clear that Wright was a fluent liar, an inventor and arranger of ...”

“... In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get on,’ Peter writes mournfully, ‘some do not. We were the sort that just didn’t ...”

“... into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that ...”

“... of value, though, that ‘mere’ is profoundly wrong. Mid-17th-century verse rarely asks to be read as part of the oeuvre of a single author. Instead, it thrives on miscellaneity. This long and damnably difficult to live through period produced an extraordinary quantity of poems which deserve to be appreciated as ephemera. Poems to named individuals, poems ...”

“... unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which is the most narrative book, you could read pretty much anywhere.’ In other words, you could make your own ...”

“... role played by patrons in the formation of public taste, an encomium it would be difficult to read without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the ...”