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“... 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 ...”

“... from the darkness to surprise her.’ Vasari describes a lost painting by Giorgione, in which St George is seen from the back, while the front of his body is reflected in the clear water in which he stands, his left profile in a polished breastplate and his right profile in a mirror, the painting presenting ‘multiple perspectives worthy of a Cubist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... arrogance of Coriolanus, the tears of Desdemona, and the outrageousness and ingratitude of Prince George as Prince Hal. Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park remarks that ‘one gets acquainted with Shakespeare without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Shakespeare was certainly very much there in spirit, partly due to the acting of ...”

“... or a novel anyway, if not a piece of theatre?), and I’ll have just one genuine artist present, a painter whose pictures are full of doors and mirrors, and she’ll go off and drown herself in the bathtub – just think of the symbolism! And I’ll put in a bit of religious allegory, with the party representing a hell on earth and the actress’s body ...”

“... Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there and ...”

“... historical problems. It opens the floodgates of anecdote and quaint observation. The Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo lived only on hard-boiled eggs. Sumerian workmen were sometimes given beer in lieu of wages. Ships’ biscuits remained edible, when mixed with water, for up to fifty years. The fore-stomach of the flea becomes blackened by ‘a solid mass ...”

“... could borrow from various ‘discourses’, but, as the narrator of another story puts it, a painter can simply ‘pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper in the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, there’s that), and lo! People crowd about and cry, “A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!”’ It was a ...”

“... history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl Miller found The ...”