“... of his incessant, unashamed repetition of themes and settings, which suggests the work of a painter (such as one of his beloved Surrealists) rather than a narrative artist. His stories stay in the mind like pictures at a grand retrospective, differing from one another in their superficial choice of colour or form but tenaciously exploring a ...”

“... like the equally impractical flying machine, was of anything like the same significance for it. George Grosz, an early admirer, concluded on meeting him in 1922 that he was an extremely stupid man; this would not necessarily have made him a bad artist, but it should perhaps lead us to take his theoretical contributions with a pinch of salt. What is surely ...”

“... Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann whom Lennon called ‘the exis’. Stuart Sutcliffe, the painter whom Lennon had recruited to play bass, fell in love with Kirchherr, a fashion designer and photographer. In most cases, the pop star’s rebel pose is laughable hypocrisy: successes in the pop world are egocentric, ignorant and conformist. Lennon’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... much of the art that was looted, sold, hidden or damaged in the course of the war. Men such as George Stout and James Rorimer had to deal not only with the indifference to art of the Allied officers, and the antagonism and bloody-mindedness of the Germans: there were the practical and logistical problems of working in the heat and chaos of battle. There ...”

“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”