“... the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic situations just fizzle out.’ This is close to George Eliot’s thoughts about the tragedy that lies in ‘the fact of frequency’, and it is what happens in The Grand-Dad. The executioner is robbed of his victim, the aristocrat is robbed of a stagey death, and the audience is robbed of the sort of finality ...”

“... The Morning Bath was the pastel most frequently discussed by reviewers of the 1886 exhibition. George Moore called it the ‘chef d’oeuvre’: ‘The effect is prodigious. Degas has done what Baudelaire did – he has invented un frisson nouveau.’ This frisson was nouveau, perhaps, in its gratuitousness. Not engaged in any activity, not presenting a ...”

“... Eardley’s paintings of the Samson children, they seem to have some common knowledge only the painter can access. They are fidgety children who become fixed with candour; they are tenement apparitions, scratched into the urban record, surrounded by a randomness of graffiti and change.Eardley’s short career is one of the most fascinating of her ...”

“... in a collegiate bohemian squalor that masked their class differences. Milo aspired to be a painter but his ambitions never really passed beyond daydreams, so he ended up a resentful office cog. Purdy ‘made his own money out of some of his father’s money’. The scenario begins as a mercy mission but turns into a power play, as Purdy tells his ...”

“... down his neck insisting on economy. It was probably only the support of the director, the painter Francis Newbery (an Englishman), that made it possible. Worse, the architectural climate in Glasgow was changing. Since 1904 the head of the School of Architecture had been a Beaux-Arts trained Frenchman, Eugène Bourdon, who was strongly opposed to the ...”

“... was even a sign of distinction and ‘sensibility’ that in no way compromised their virility. (George Cheyne, writing in 1773 in The English Malady, went so far as to connect ‘nervous diseases’ to the progress of civilisation.) This plainly contradicts Micale’s main argument. ‘In Great Britain for a full century following the 1688 revolution, the ...”

“... locksmith, coppersmith, mechanic, workman, labourer, wharf porter, servant, sandwich man, sign painter, house decorator, journalist, photographer’, as Romain Rolland described him, Istrati was a critic of Soviet society who was denounced by the Comintern denigration and, like Victor Serge, abused as an ‘anti-Moscow anarchist’. Visitors to the Soviet ...”

“... and was exposed to two sets of morality and sexual mores. Malinowski and his closest friend, the painter and writer Stanislaw Witkiewicz, mixed in Young Poland circles when they were students, but neither became an orthodox Polish nationalist. Malinowski turned down the chance of a chair at the Jagiellonian University in order to take up a permanent position ...”

“... perceptive about others: in many ways a lovable man. By 1817 he had established himself both as a painter and as a figure in the intellectual life of Regency London. It was a world where high thinking went with ramshackle living. Haydon’s friends, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and the young Keats were all, like him, mostly self-educated and ...”

“... life, either in writing or talking, never,’ she replied. The woman’s father, a retired house painter with a grey beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my family of nine children.’ Edith ...”

“... sea or mirror city reflected in the clear water.’Staying on the floor above her was an American painter called Harvey Cohen (Edwin in Frame’s autobiography). Frame fell for his friend George Parlette (Bernard), who ‘laughed heartily and each time he laughed I felt … as if I were a vast empty palace awaiting the ...”

“... vraiment que ce soit l’Icare des ténèbres?’ To which Picasso replied: Yes, I find that George Salles’s thing is accurate, more or less – because a painter paints and doesn’t write – it’s more or less what I wanted to say. It went on for months and months, and little by little it was transformed without ...”

“... hare in Rain, Steam and Speed. ‘Always take advantage of an accident,’ Turner once said. ‘A painter can only represent the instant of an action, and what is seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in ...”

“... with local fevers. And out of those tossings and turnings a strange and clear prosody was born. George Plimpton has tripped on a handy way of telling the story of a life, so long as that life happens to be one like Truman Capote’s. In place of an account shaped by Plimpton’s sentences, what we have is a birth-to-death narrative made up of the voices of ...”

“... Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third is largely taken up by letters to Wollstonecraft, and the volume at that point seems to make a new beginning. So ...”