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“... into focus, but you seem to recognise them. They are elegant and casual. The people who come with Reynolds are their contemporaries, but the atmosphere changes. The men have more gravitas and fall naturally into classical poses, the women are winsomely theatrical. The aristocratic Van Dycks tend towards the soulful and control the arrangement of their ...”

“... pleasures are shown in black and white, for this is an exhibition dominated by engravings. Reynolds’s portrait of Garrick being tugged right and left by Comedy and Tragedy is here, but as a mezzotint. Hogarth’s work is represented in the form of drawings and prints, not paintings. The topography comes that way too. The Sandby watercolours (above ...”

“... Winterhalter for royalty in full fig, to Romney for pretty girls; Dalí gave a touch of modernity, Reynolds the kind of pose you needed for Churchill as war leader.At the National Portrait Gallery there are a number of the scrapbooks into which Beaton stuck prints clipped from contact sheets. Names and places are written underneath: they record a social life ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... that nothing about so great a figure can be wholly irrelevant, but it seems to me that both Mr Reynolds and Mr Griffin have pushed this argument a bit far. When you’ve read these books you will be exempted from ever attending to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to ...”

“... novelists, Dickens and Thackeray became journalists as well. Bored with running newspapers, G.W.M. Reynolds and Mark Lemon turned their hand to penny dreadfuls and comedies. The deregulation of the London stage in 1843 meant that actors, managers and playwrights competed for ever-growing theatrical audiences. And the great schism in the Scottish churches, the ...”

“... has not, more recently, been much in favour. The long line from Van Dyck to Lely, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence, Laszlo and Sargent has faltered; the National Portrait Gallery’s recent commissions prove that while the will may be there, egalitarianism, which has left economic gradients intact, has demolished the iconography of power. Many shorter lines ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... it was Malone who, with massive scrupulousness, collected and edited the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Malone who rediscovered Aubrey’s Brief Lives; Malone who wrote the first biography of Dryden based on primary documentary sources; and Malone whose editorial encouragement and insistence finally coaxed his friend Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the ...”

“... Annibale and Agostino, who worked in the latter part of the 16th century in Bologna and Rome. Reynolds’s second Discourse gives a notion of how high their reputation stood in 18th-century England (he is addressing the students of the Royal Academy School): It is not an easy task to point out those various excellencies for your imitation which lie ...”

“... Adams on the ‘permanent’ issue. Adams observed that ‘complete’ was enough for Albert Reynolds, Dick Spring and President Clinton. A Sunday Tribune journalist at the scene described a British reporter badgering away on this point. ‘Adams watched, amused, as he tried to put the question again and some brief squabbling broke out among the ...”

“... and holy … This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heavens ...”

“... not doubt that Mr McGregor, had he been blessed with children, would have read them The Tale of Peter Rabbit; and it is not hard to imagine someone still smiling over the enchanting Mrs Tittlemouse as they set a mousetrap. Why should we find it surprising that an art-lover in 1790 or so, who wept at a picture of an undernourished, ragged child gathering ...”

“... should be, different from each other,’ Egerton says. ‘Wright is not elevated by putting down Reynolds, nor are his gifts easily measured against Gainsborough’s. Wright is his own man.’ The point is taken, but Wright’s differences, the strangeness which creeps into some of his portrait groups, his predilection for lamplight and fireworks, eruptions ...”

“... The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months after Millais’s death: ‘a finer promise than any artist of his time’ was wasted. His later pictures were done ...”