“... made his living from: Théophile Gautier’s later guess at Goya’s feelings in his portrait of Charles IV and Family – ‘the baker on the corner and his wife after they’ve won the lottery’ – is unforgettable and wrong. Yet I stand by my first intuition. Of course as I spent more time at the show and became accustomed to Goya’s visual idiom ...”

“... technique known as ‘factor analysis’ so as to minimise the contributions of his early mentor Charles Spearman while falsely accentuating his own; and that he had systematically abused his position as editor of the British Journal for Statistical Psychology. Hearnshaw concluded that Burt might have been an honourable person in his prime, but that he had ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... same all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it was also about perks and ...”

“... in his verse-play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World: it’s not much of a play, to be frank). The aimless years of his young manhood were now magically converted into high-grade literary capital. His first novel, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts came out in 1990. It was well received, and two more novels followed, also set in ‘an ...”

“... on cross-breeding as a means of preventing degeneration inspired proto-eugenic schemes, including Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Essay on the Manner of Improving the Human Species (1756), and the first practical projects of racial engineering in French colonies. These revolved around the creation of a mixed Euro-African race, in charge of military ...”

“... a single bishop at the top of his list of achievements?’ It is the voice of sober realism. Canon Charles Pattinson, who had been Henson’s chaplain, finally persuaded Chadwick to take on the at first rather repugnant task of spending so long with the Henson papers and writing the bishop’s life. Pattinson told him that ‘Henson’s ...”

“... the only writer who has ever rewritten stories after they were published. I read somewhere that Frank O’Connor was constantly changing his stories long after they were in print. He went through about three different versions of his great story ‘Guests of the Nation’. For me, it was like conceiving a story and seeing it as unfinished business. The ...”

“... scholarship that the staff in auction houses have enjoyed. Lacey devotes an early chapter to Charles Bell, Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, who between 1920 and 1924 spent one day a week cataloguing Old Master drawings and paintings (especially British portraits) at Sotheby’s to a completely new standard. Lacey depends ...”

“... but relations became strained last year when Moscow denounced its rapporteur, Britain’s Frank Judd, and refused to go on working with him. Judd’s successor, the Swiss Andreas Gross, was allowed into Chechnya in August in spite of criticising the lack of democracy in the elections Russia organised. Gross believes that the world has to work with the ...”

“... but Bertolt Brecht called it ‘the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre’. (He and Charles Laughton hoped in vain that Welles would direct their 1947 production of Galileo.) By the mid-1940s, Welles regarded Hollywood as a place where he made money by acting. But he also persuaded the independent producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to ...”

“... of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em on Sheppey in 1975, the year after Johnson arrived. In the episode Frank Spencer takes his driving test for the tenth time, and hundreds of locals stood on the beach to watch Crawford, who was known for doing his own stunts, drive a blue Hillman Imp off Sheerness jetty. Crawford is Sheppey showbiz royalty: his mother, Doris ...”

“... 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 nature of the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’ as governing principles of 20th-century art. The underlying ...”

“... was never permitted to become a defining feature of Irish Catholic culture.’ Frank Duff, who founded the Legion of Mary and was perhaps the most influential Catholic layman of the time, ‘was an able defender of the Jewish community’, as were some of his colleagues. Anti-semitism in Ireland was kept on the fringes of the Catholic ...”

“... to sexual pleasure, especially his emphasis on the idea that women can enjoy sex, seemed unusually frank and modern; later on changing sexual mores overtook him, and lines about heroes ‘enjoying’ women ‘in the fullest sense’ or ‘storming the gates of paradise’ came to seem creaky.) The depiction early in the novel of a grey Stalinist Moscow riddled ...”