“... out as an impoverished 11-year-old impersonator of men, she became the wife of the Tory MP Sir Walter de Frece, hobnobbed with high society, amassed a huge fortune and retired to Monte Carlo. Kitty Grant, the music-hall and real-life partner of Major’s father, was not so lucky: she was struck on stage by a falling steel girder and sustained fatal brain ...”

“... was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh that now hangs in Manchester Art Gallery. To the last, Bradlaugh remained a pioneer of customs we now take for granted, his daughter Hypatia arranging for him to be buried in one of the London ...”

“... the approval of the scholar and critic T. Sturge Moore. The painters with whom he consorted – Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Augustus John – chose to regard him as a poet. ‘The Fine Arts they imagined were already in good hands,’ he recalled in Rude Assignment (1950), his second volume of autobiography, ‘namely their own.’ But it was ...”

“... for modern art in Victorian Britain; and as for his direct influence, as one observes it in Sickert, Wilson Steer, Gwen John and Victor Pasmore, it is hard not to think of it as beneficent and inspiring. People sometimes rebuke Whistler, as they rebuke Pound, for being noisy and obstreperous, but the polemics – the Ruskin trial, and the ‘Ten ...”

“... first attempts at book-making were for children. Had he become a professional illustrator such as Walter Crane or Kate Greenaway penury would have been avoided. But though he admired Charles Keene’s observation of types and was encouraged and helped by Ricketts and Shannon there was too much of his father’s son in him, and not enough of the English ...”

“... closed, but not for long. It was inextricably mingled with the web of metropolitan culture, with Sickert and Symons, Yeats, Walkley and even Shaw; also with sex and drink. The peculiar character of music-hall entertainment – a mixture of singing, dancing, stand-up comics, acrobats – derived, it seems, from an Act of 1843, which decreed that licensees ...”

“... plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter Owen’s strange First World War fantasy, The Cross of Carl (1931), in which underground trains shunt still conscious corpses from the trenches to industrial units, where they will be rendered into meat. Silver rails out of the capital double as telegraph ...”