“... 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 ...”

“... of the empire. His son, Osman Hamdi Bey, would become the empire’s leading archaeologist and painter, training under Jean-Léon Gérôme, the master of French Orientalism. Yet Gérôme’s painting The Slave Market is a lurid portrayal of Muslim slavery; it’s a work that, as Marozzi notes, ‘pits Western moral supremacy against a cruel and depraved ...”

“... the kind of modern vessel he opposed till the day of his death several decades later.The painter, David Wilkie, had been prescribed foreign travel by his doctor, as a remedy for what sounds like depression. He was a Scotsman who’d risen from poverty and, in the early part of the century, became a great favourite of the establishment (...”

“... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in the ...”

“... people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We want George,’ ‘We want Liz.’ I don’t believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not ...”

“... first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his ...”

“... cast into the political wilderness by the time the decade was over; two – Donogh O’Malley and George Colley – would die suddenly (there was no such sudden death among the old guard); one – Brian Lenihan – would be fired in disgrace; another, now dead, would end up sodden with drink in the European Parliament; and then there was Haughey. The ...”

“... grovel and it makes people lie. Politicians long ago realised the uses of royal circuses: Lloyd George devised a wholly bogus Investiture Ceremony for the Prince of Wales at a time when the Irish were getting out of hand, and Harold Wilson did the same in the late Sixties when Welsh and Celtic nationalism was again on the rise. Despite an enormous media ...”

“... commemorating the tourist attraction which it was also to become. The third narrative tells how George Meredith modelled for the corpse in the painting and how his wife then ran away with the painter (see also the sonnets in Modern Love). The three tales are deftly assembled and get on very well together. Chatterton is ...”

“... ever transcribed, ‘I Know Moonlight’; American pop ballads of the period by Irving Berlin and George Gershwin; traditional English ballads, French popular songs, and even an Italian folksong, ‘Donna lombarda’, a consequence of the friendship with Virgil Thomson, who collected such materials. Likewise, there are quotations from ...”

“... fourteen when he arrived in London from Everton, Lancashire in 1753. He came to be apprenticed to George Keith, a bookseller in Gracechurch Street in the City. This was Hogarth’s London, a scene of dirty streets and dark alleys in which impressionable young people were met off the coach by an expectant crowd of brothel keepers, cutpurses and card ...”