“... 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 ...”

“... his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped ...”

“... them, are wholly poetic or rhetorical – that is to say, linguistic; they owe nothing to the painter’s nice distinctions between the pigments on his palette, nor to a naturalist’s knowledge of just how a swift differs from a swallow. Grigson’s views on the proper language for poetry would, on the other hand, make the poet subservient to both the ...”

“... hands for £1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be dismissed by Mrs Bottomley as just another ancillary worker bleeding (sic) the Health Service dry.18 July. Lord (ex-Chief Rabbi) Jakobovits is in favour of genetic engineering to rid the world of homosexuality. I wonder ...”

“... of the opening. We are told of her mother’s death, of the break-up of her marriage to the poet George MacBeth, of the obsessively repeated train-journeys in Italy with her infant son which were her way of fending off (or having) a nervous breakdown, and of her incipient relationship with the painter Robbie Scott-Duff ...”

“... personifications on the skylines of buildings, which reached a climax in the quadrigas by George Récepon which burst with exhilarating absurdity from the roof of the Grand Palais in 1900. This type of sculpture was made possible by welding sheets of copper over an armature – essentially the same technique that Mukhina used. The Winged Victory was ...”

“... in politics rather than literature: he had an obsession, for instance, with the theories of Henry George. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Douglas as anything other than an artist. At the risk of over-simplification, one might describe Hillary as a man of action endowed with a journalistic facility, and Douglas as an artist with a taste for ...”

“... little, after 1688, the arts relied on royal patronage, and how much on commercial exploitation. George II mattered less than Tyres did. In one of many entertaining vignettes, Brewer describes the attempts to celebrate the ending of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1749 and the British monarchy’s ‘inability or unwillingness to use the arts ...”

“... If a 19th-century paternity exists for this novel, it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that that beguiling property – so eminently characteristic of Meredith – of seeming to slide more or less ...”

“... he reports a conversation on the subject which took place some years earlier between a ‘foreign painter’ and Fromentin, the historian of Dutch art. Modernism in theology had, however, already been denounced by another Dutchman, the Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, who, in 1871, published a book entitled Het Modernisme: Een Fata Morgana op Christelijk Gebied ...”

“... of my character.’ He was a nightwalker in the tradition of Léon Spilliaert, the Ostend painter; a connoisseur of suburbs and out-of-season resorts where impatient dunes threaten to bury speculative housing. Vaes repeated his established circuits, testing for pavements in which ‘the Elsewhere had taken root’. There were psychogeographical ...”

“... leaping great distances ... overflowing with an abundance of power’. Alexandre Benois, the painter, and one of the new kind of set designers courted by Diaghilev, saw the young Nijinsky as ‘half-cat, half-snake, fiendishly agile, feminine and yet wholly terrifying’. And he tried to capture the new ethos: ‘In the ballet,’ he wrote, ‘I would ...”

“... and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will become precious and mannered. Continue on your way, but ...”

“... Bay Area leftie muckety-mucks (Jerry Brown, Angela Davis and the soon-to-be-assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were others) bedazzled by the ghoulish Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple cult, Elvis-style drug addict, ambisexual pussy-predator, and self-anointed ‘revolutionary ...”