“... and glorious’. He leapt like Marcus Curtius into the gulf, taking with him, according to John Barrell, the whole moribund tradition of High Art. Haydon’s status as one of the few literal martyrs to critical theory makes him an appropriate, if somewhat ominous subject for Painting and the Politics of Culture. Here the questions raised implicitly in ...”

“... moment of his election to Parliament to the eventual achievement of his goal. One wonders whether John Major ever heard a similar message click-clacking from railway carriage wheels in the course of his extraordinary non-stop journey up the same greasy pole. There was scarcely time for him to form expectations during the interval that ran from his original ...”

“... natural-history keeper staged annual cremations of Sloane’s decaying entomological specimens. John Cannon, an eminent plant taxonomist, reveals that after contemplating Sloane’s herbarium ‘one is left with a slight nagging feeling of anti-climax’ because the collector had the misfortune to live just before taxonomy became a proper science with ...”

“... Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey isn’t clear. One hopes Anne didn’t do to it what Samuel Pepys did to his pet monkey in ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... Williams), only two (named) amateurs have been deemed worthy of representation in the show: John White Abbott, the remarkably faithful imitator of his teacher Francis Towne, and the Reverend William Gilpin, who merits such exceptional treatment solely on account of his work as a leading theorist of the picturesque (in fact, Gilpin didn’t produce ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”

“... good behaviour and taste are critical because everyone knows where the Guggenheims came from. ‘Joseph and Meyer, these were my grandfathers, and both men were peddlers, peasants, despised,’ Peggy explains. As young men in Ohio and Pennsylvania they bought and sold what they could (‘shoehorns, spectacles’), eventually amassing enough capital to go ...”

“... family knelt to say the Rosary in the evening, and if you wanted to pass an exam you prayed to St Joseph of Cupertino. The only moments of relief from utter boredom were when young Colm’s father appeared to be shaking with uncontrollable laughter as the beads passed through his hands, and had to leave the room. Religious solemnity has a unique power to ...”

“... the form of a ‘patent portable water closet’ convertible into a ‘floating life-preserver’. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the first great prefabricated building and the ‘largest enclosed space on earth’, was assembled in four months. There was never a question of building a vast revolutionary structure and then wondering what to put in ...”

“... with the publication of Tracts for the Times in 1833, grew in fame along with its great polemicist John Henry Newman, was denounced for being a semi-covert form of Roman Catholicism, and then suffered a colossal scandal in 1845 when Newman became the highest profile convert to Catholicism in the history of England, thus confirming what critics of the movement ...”

“... dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig – was both, to the max); not a pacifist much less an activist but a passivist; this professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector, owner of Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo and ...”

“... Joseph​ Banks owed his fortune to land and his celebrity to the sea. Born in 1743 to a wealthy landowning family, he was sketchily educated at Harrow, Eton and Oxford. His father died when he was 18, and he came into his inheritance three years later, living for the rest of his life off the rents from large estates in the Lincolnshire fens, Derbyshire and Staffordshire ...”

“... so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to ...”

“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”