“... 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 ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... medievalist who saw the ‘life of forms’ as an almost autonomous force in art, and the American George Kubler, an expert in pre-Columbian artefacts for whom the Panofskyan emphasis on individual style, strict chronology and iconographic analysis (the hunting for sources of images in documents) was not helpful in a field where known artists, exact dates and ...”

“... on the morning of 2 November 2004; it was probably no coincidence that this was also the day when George W. Bush was expected to be voted back into office. Van Gogh was a fourth-generation descendant of the painter, but better known in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands as a film-maker, writer, columnist, chat-show ...”

“... pneumatic tyre in 1888, and most car and bicycle tyres use essentially the same valve patented by George Schrader in 1893. The same period also saw the extension of continuous processing for mass consumption, with systems that continue to be used today. The crimped bottle cap as we know it was invented in Baltimore in 1891 by William ...”

“... born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the blues, Melly, not quoted here, was in a good position to assess a particular Liverpudlian trait: that of ...”

“... her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the ...”

“... on TV. I can remember a time when ursine influencers were reliably geezerish, like Hofmeister’s George in his pork-pie hat and yellow satin jacket (‘For a great lager, follow the bear’). But cuddliness resumed in the 1990s, in successive Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns, and hasn’t let up since. Bears distribute their weight towards their hind legs, and ...”

“... to the exercise of compassion). The need for sympathy in human relations had been central to George Eliot’s intensely moral interpretation of what art can do for us: ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies,’ she wrote in her 1856 essay on ...”

“... immigrants and regularly held political meetings. At one of them Meir met Morris Myerson, a sign painter who gave her long lists of books to read, and whom she eventually married. She returned to Milwaukee at her father’s insistence, but the exposure to new ideas and debates about Zionism, socialism and territorialism had filled her with enthusiasm. She ...”

“... their son unnamed in order to spare the child ridicule. (‘You can’t mess up ———.’) The painter in So Much Blue (2017) has spoken the title of his long-gestating work-in-progress just once ‘under my breath while I was alone in my studio’ and fears that his children ‘might try to name it and so ruin it and everything’.There are various ways ...”

“... 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 ...”