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“... 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 ...”

“... on signing himself in letters to his ‘Spanish Woman’ – arranged for the court portrait painter to paint Lola’s picture, and soon developed the habit of kissing it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. He visited her daily at her hotel. And he lavished money on her, while being so mean with his own wife and eight children that they ...”

“... his talents: at the time of joining the GPO Film Unit, he thought of himself primarily as a painter, though he also wrote poetry and literary criticism, designed theatre sets, collected rare books and had begun to compile texts for an ambitious anthology about the machine age and its dehumanising effects, which owed something to his parents’ William ...”

“... an objection that Henry Senior had also registered when William contemplated a career as a painter. James notes with amusement how little his father’s attitude resembled the usual grounds for objecting to the artistic professions; but Henry Senior was nothing if not consistent in his determination to keep all alternatives open, and the only thing ...”

“... by which its countryside should be judged. Yet, as Daniels points out, Constable was in fact a painter of London, not just of the Stour Valley in Suffolk. It was Victorian biographers and art critics who focused on his rural canvases in part because they offered an escape from so much of what England had become, industrially advanced, aggressively ...”

“... a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and briefly a Tory MP, while his wife was the daughter of a brewing family; Anne was a debutante and presented at court in the traditional upper-class way. But then she married the ...”