“... from distortions of vision, some not. Viewed in this light, the history of modern painting can be read as a set of transformations of ‘normal’ images which bear a close resemblance to the effects of faulty sight. The blurs, distortions, mistings-over, narrowings and fragmentations of vision which follow from mechanical failures like distortion of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them. Indeed our vote was not a snub at all, but an accolade, a recognition that we had learned to read the new map of politics. Yet if the vote was a response to the changed political atmosphere it took a complicated form. Dons have responded to the increased politicisation of education, as of every other sphere of public life, by making their own withdrawal ...”

“... to take over the Russian near-abroad, or Swedes who want to avenge their defeat at the hands of Peter the Great (that pearl came from Kiselev). It’s hard to find anyone who takes this stuff literally, but it helps to create a climate in which conspiracy becomes the norm. The Ukrainian crisis has also triggered other, far less savoury associations. At one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... was leaving a committee meeting when an unknown comrade came up and pressed a letter ‘to be read later’ into his hand. Hannington soon removed the envelope from his pocket, opened it idly, and was astonished to find himself summoned to a secret meeting where all kinds of mayhem and sedition were on the agenda. The note was couched in terms that ...”

“... quote, something concrete. We use Hazlitt to advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly ...”