“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... royal house of David and beyond, but it does so through his putative father, Joseph; St Luke and Christian doctrine insist that his true father was of yet higher rank. The Christian myth is the classiest ‘family romance’ of all. For the most part, Dr Liebert marks his speculations very fairly as such. They are ...”

“... One of John McGahern’s stories begins thus: ‘There are times when we see the small events we look forward to – a visit, a wedding, a new day – as having no existence but in the expectation. They are to be, they will happen, and before they do they almost are not: minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life ...”

“... of individual possessions, money and exchange, he derived general principles from the primitive Christian idea that the earth was a common treasury. He sometimes called for the abolition and redistribution of private property, sometimes for the free use of unplanted wastelands, and sometimes more narrowly for the distribution of confiscated Crown and Church ...”

“... of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... in fifty words is not worth including. To invoke a more constructive example, the makers of the Christian creeds showed how pregnant economy – ‘crucified, dead and buried’ – could get around the problem. A further alternative would be to adopt the stylised format of Who’s Who or Debrett (Henry VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine ...”

“... Ruskin’s biography they mean a great deal. Briefly, the story is of Ruskin’s acquaintance with John and Maria La Touche, whom he probably met in 1858, four years after the annulment of his marriage; his growing love for their younger daughter Rose; his realisation that his feelings for her were romantically loving; his proposal of marriage in 1866; her ...”

“... He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of ...”

“... popular legend is that the BOP was a long-term bestseller. But as McAleer shows, locked into its Christian and anti-masturbation propaganda mission, the RTS weekly was almost immediately overtaken by the more market-responsive publications of the commercial publishers. By 1900, ten years after its launch, the BOP was a lame duck, subsidised by the RTS, and ...”

“... especially, and valuably, proficient in Coptic, a language that had devolved since the early Christian era into a purely liturgical medium but which was known to be continuous with ancient Egyptian, and, in its written form, used letters of the Greek alphabet along with signs it had taken over from the old Egyptian cursive script. It was by extrapolating ...”

“... and takes a chance on ‘wilderness’; the coloniser blindly penetrating new territory; the Christian having a first unmediated encounter with Creation. ‘Glory pulsed in her gut; she, a nobody, a nothing, going farther than any man of Europe had yet gone in this place so new to their eyes.’ Suddenly, Groff’s premise seems not so much sparse as ...”

“... Vasari coined the name ‘Fra Angelico’ a hundred years later. In 1982, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II, which is why Italian audiences now call him Beato Angelico – not just angelic, but blessed.With more than 140 pieces on display, the exhibition has enough material to chart the full arc of his career. The works are arranged broadly ...”

“... other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference, one can’t help wondering while reading such notes, between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal ...”