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“... as a whole was most identified. By the mid-1970s Spider-Man’s great plot-lines – The Death of Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s ethereal blonde girlfriend, who would haunt him as Kim Novak haunts James Stewart in Vertigo; The Unmasking of Green Goblins 1, 2, and 3 (a shock each time); The Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain) – were well ...”

“... and Hassall the authorised biography in 1964 – though Delany’s bibliography puts it in 1972. John Lehmann’s sympathetic debunking biography of 1980 gets into the bibliography but not into the text. Delany’s Neo-Pagan era begins in 1907 towards the end of Brooke’s first year at Cambridge. Brooke had won a scholarship to King’s College from stuffy ...”

“... When John Major ascended to 10 Downing Street, the wits were at first unsure quite how to set about him. There was the obvious, the elementary ‘grey’ approach: the Burton suits, the haircut, the delicious fry-ups and so on. On this reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J ...”

“... Gwen John’s attic bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light, Hammershøi’s frugal Danish ones and Van Gogh’s narrow bedroom: these are pictures you might choose if exiled to a desert island ...”

“... and procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the ...”

“... to thunder – is a hot line to the person who created Bertha Mason. Yet a few feet away is Gwen John’s Girl in a Red Shawl, in creams and rusts, with no harsh lines but very exact hair, looking like a mural in the process of being uncovered. Without a linking narrative it is not easy to decide what might bring the paintings by ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and ...”

“... The mourners make their way along the ‘tatters’ of the old, winding road, passing Harry and Gwen Williams’s cottage, where Raymond grew up. Assembled in the churchyard, ‘Raymond’s young men’ (as his wife, Joy, used to call them) are now middle-aged and showing signs of wear and tear, ‘thinning and unkempt hair ... a bad back here, a heavy ...”

“... his attacks, unscathed, protected by their own sense of themselves. It is a relief to turn to John Lahr’s Automatic Vaudeville, 15 reprinted essays written over the last decade, which go far to confirm his rating as the Leavis of the popular, largely performing arts, though this collection also includes a snatch of reportage on Dallas – at once living ...”

“... you!) Marie Laurencin seems far too feeble to mention; so too, I’m afraid, does Vanessa Bell. Gwen John? Not exactly a she-titan of the brush. Elaine de Kooning? The canonisation of wives has never seemed to me an effective feminist strategy. Dame Laura Knight? I love her, but does anyone else? Joan Mitchell? Marvellous but … uhhh … I peter out ...”

“... An ordinary kitchen. Gwen, a middle-aged wo­man, talks to the camera.He​  pulled up his trousers.‘You are nice to me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have shown it to anybody else.’I said, ‘Well, I hope you haven’t been doing.’‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Not much chance of that. No demand at the moment.’He’d come home from school looking a bit down and retreats upstairs to his room and doesn’t even bother to raid the fridge, by which I take it something’s amiss ...”

“... himself for being subject to them.He had been trying to finish his fellowship dissertation on ‘John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama’ (he did win a fellowship, but not until 1913). He wasn’t sleeping; Olivier said he seemed ‘dotty & queer’, liable to say or think ‘horrors’. He didn’t even pay all that much attention to the publication of his ...”

“... in The Captain and the Enemy), he was obsessed by romantic love – for his sister’s governess Gwen Howell, for his fiancée, and later for a mistress – while thinking himself incapable of it. A compulsive diary-keeper, he liked to record pleasures and moments very different from the atmosphere of those in his books but used to develop a style and ...”

“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as ...”