“... the Uplands, Furze’s portrait of his wife with greyhounds from 1903, Sargent’s portrait of Sir Frank Swettenham from 1904 and Boldini’s Duchess of Marlborough with Her Son from 1906, even Orpen’s Homage to Manet from 1909 (a less radical tribute to a radical painter is hard to imagine) share a suavity which can still enrage. The Boldini (a very silly ...”

“... Sobers, who? Some Australians who grew up when I did argue with some force for Keith Miller. As Frank Keating’s book proves, however, Miller can quickly be rejected for second place. It goes, unquestionably, to Ian Botham. Indeed in one crucial respect, Botham beats even the great Sobers himself. Only 22 times in over a thousand Test matches has a player ...”

“... the most famous and impressive was the lighting of the entirety of the spiral-ramped rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum – daylight was not excluded as it is at the Hayward.) On one level, Flavin’s installations are exercises in simple geometry. The possible configurations of standard tubes and colours – even those of plain white ones ...”

“... sometimes spontaneously, at worst like tonic water shaken to restore a semblance of lost vitality. Peter Conrad goes in more for weight. You could say of him what the earlier James extravagantly observed of the earlier Conrad, that he offers a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. In other words, he ...”

“... see them. Foreign artists, photographers and film-makers in particular – Wim Wenders, Robert Frank – have a special liking for this aspect of the look of America. Hopper did it better. The images get stronger as he gets older. The pictures he made during early trips to Paris in the 1920s have a nice feeling for asymmetrical composition; things happen ...”

“... supposed. The ‘ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes’ is said to be Peter Lombard in the first half of the 12th century, though Peter was citing authorities, which makes him different from scientific modern scholars, who cite sources. Scientific history is conventionally associated with Leopold ...”

“... witnesses against the incredulous. The Christ who rose on the third day was seen by Cephas (alias Peter) and ‘above’ five hundred others, some of them still alive; also by James, and indeed by ‘all the apostles’. Finally, by a special grace, he was seen by Paul himself, unworthy as he was to be counted an apostle, en route to Damascus.A prodigiously ...”

“... Malamud (though the resemblance doesn’t seem close) and Amy is imagined to be possibly Anne Frank, rescued and resettled in America. Strange identifications echo round Roth’s collected works, and they aid the creation of narrative and biographical ambiguities that serve to protect the freedom of the imagination. In The Facts, an autobiographical ...”

“... and bulging around her as old flesh does. Jeremy Lewison in the catalogue calls it a ‘brutally frank self assessment’, ‘the obverse of a pin-up girl’. But brutal is the wrong word. It is certainly truthful about how things look, selectively truthful in the things it chooses to emphasise or simplify, aggressive perhaps, in the way of people who ...”

“... An illustration shows its perky sculptural firmness exhibited alongside architectural work by Frank Gehry and others in a previous museum installation. To dress a body, it is clear, demands disciplines that Gehry’s architectural inventions can afford to ignore. Fashion, like fiction and popular music, offers selves to identify with. Through it standard ...”

“... Or, after reading a newspaper account of a fishing boat lost at sea, produce an equivalent of Frank Bramley’s picture of a young woman collapsed on the floor of a low room lit by the grey light of A Hopeless Dawn? These are images you can enjoy, or make jokes about, but not imitate. Steve Bell, with due apologies, might pick up on them. It is not clear ...”

“... of images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter Henry Emerson’s pictures from the 1880s and 1890s of rural life in East Anglia have a Millet-like quietness. Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photogravures of London at night taken in the early 1900s emulate the inky fogs and soft highlights of contemporary ...”

“... Jean Taylor met Peter Medawar when they were students. When she married him she therefore knew that he was an extremely able biologist, but she cannot have foreseen what an energetic polymath she was attaching herself to. Medawar’s ability led at first to frequent moves to better jobs, with consequent house-hunting, and to much travel, on which she accompanied him, to lecture and attend conferences ...”

“... On 9 November last year, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the philosopher Manfred Frank was invited to give the principal address at the memorial service which is held annually in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. The Paulskirche was the home of the first democratically elected German national assembly, which flourished briefly amidst the revolutions of 1848-9, and, in keeping with this setting, Frank refused to limit himself to a ‘retrospective ritual of mourning ...”

“... man himself on directors such as Komisarjevsky, Michel Saint-Denis (more fully treated by Croall), Peter Brook and Peter Hall. They are, of course, purely theatrical. Gielgud had an abnormally long theatrical life, appearing in or directing a great many plays in a great many places and also making dozens of movies, so his ...”