“... time when the study of ancient Ireland was becoming politically resonant. He became friendly with George Petrie, who had done much to revitalise the antiquities committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and was responsible for its acquisition of important Irish manuscripts. Wilde worked with Petrie in County Meath, north of Dublin, discovering the remnants of ...”

“... York, where Wyatt arrives after reading for the ministry and realising that his vocation is as a painter. In childhood he acquired the idea that originality was a sin, being a challenge to the Creator, and so he makes copies, starting with a supposedly authentic Bosch that his father brought back from Spain (claiming it was a fake). Wyatt slyly substitutes ...”

“... have at least some contacts in Society; but Mrs Bandman Palmer was free to be populist, like Lloyd George. For Joyce, she would be the New Woman at the top of her form: very unlike Molly, of course, but he needed a contrasting specimen. However, these social observations would not have disturbed him. One might think that a man so deeply (though not ...”

“... It is probably as much a mistake to ask a working historian to discuss this theme as to ask a painter to give his views on aesthetics. Carr had not much more to offer than a version of Fifties progressivism: history teaches respect for the present, or, better still, the Soviet present. In places, it read like a Marxist 1066 and All That. It ...”

“... Day-Lewis was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or ...”

“... thousand distinguished fashionables’. On 12 April, she was received at Carlton Palace by King George IV, who, it was reported, ‘expressed great pleasure at her appearance’. So many people came to see Crachami that she was soon exhausted. In fact, she may have died of exhaustion, though it was more probably TB. On Thursday, 3 June, she received more ...”

“... yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones ...”

“... choreography broke completely with the classical conventions of ballet. Nikolai Roerich, a painter and archaeologist, believed he had unearthed evidence of human sacrifice among the ancient Scythians, and this was used as the basis of the ballet, for which he designed the costumes, styling them after peasant dress. In exile, Stravinsky laboured long ...”

“... were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote. As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I ...”

“... twinning us with Croydon. No longer is the innocence of G. Davis affirmed in large white letters. George is certainly not OK. The obituaries are in for a life of bad timing: he was caught at the wheel of a getaway van outside the Bank of Cyprus on the Seven Sisters Road in Holloway, 16 months after his release by the home secretary on the grounds that his ...”

“... to offer – that Pope’s maternal aunt was wife to the man who was perhaps the finest English painter of the 17th century, the miniaturist Samuel Cooper; and the Life itself, illustrated by many portraits – both reproductions and verbal descriptions of the poet’s host of friends – is not unlike a collection of Augustan miniatures. Its ...”

“... chorister-hero making his high pure etherial and childish music in ‘the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas’ – on the site of Cowley Motor Works, presumably, just outside Oxford. And when, in the last movement of the book, Hubert’s father takes him by high-speed viaducted ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”

“... teacher and speaker; stylist and rhetorician; lyricist and word-artist; translator and linguist; painter and botanist. For Luxemburg, letter writing was a daily task (there are 2350 letters in the first five volumes of the Gesammelte Briefe). It was, one feels reading this collection, the way she spoke to others and to herself. She was also a ...”

“... jerks’, joining notorious loudmouths of the era such as the New York Yankees’ bullying owner George Steinbrenner (another Roy Cohn client). From the Bronx to the Battery, opinion on Trump set as hard as the cement on his construction sites and as fast as he had ordered underpaid Polish immigrant construction workers in 1980 to jackhammer the Art Deco ...”