“... studies primers and coffee-table books. They provide both an intellectual commentary, written by academics, journalists and art-world figures, and a comprehensive set of colour reproductions of the works in a show, taken by specialised photographers. From a practical point of view they are freebies for the ...”

“... Seventies (which now appear positively antiquarian) as a radiant blank. Polar nothingness bordered by custard-yellow feeder roads steering over-ambitious voyagers back to the tunnel and the distant prospect of a return to civilisation. This pilgrim’s progress is a familiar one for card-carrying Cockneys, a way out, a trip into the unknown. Musician and ...”

“... terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight into the dictionaries of quotations and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck ...”

“... is one overarching formula, we are told, under which all intelligible locutions about freedom can be subsumed. The prevalence of this belief appears to be due in large part to the influence of a single classic article, Gerald MacCallum’s ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’ (1967). Whenever the freedom of an agent is in ...”

“... English and provincial event, the procession into which this ill-assorted group will shortly be organised also includes people dressed in simulated buckram and taffeta and the gleaming mock-silver of property breastplates and crowns, all of them borrowed from the second-best wardrobe of the Royal Shakespeare Company in order to deck out students and ...”

“... remote, even quaint, the Tres Grandes of the Mexican School – Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – are often treated as a single entity. Where distinctions are made, the didacticism of Rivera’s work tends, and I believe deserves, to be unfavourably compared to the expressionist passion of ...”

“... premature death in violent and mysterious circumstances in 1610, pictures influenced by his work were to be found in many different parts of Europe. There were paintings of card parties inspired by his youthful canvases, typically featuring a gay pink plume against a buff ...”

“... The heroes of Albert Camus’s books can be quite annoying: surly, self-dramatising Hamlets who like to think of themselves as strong, silent loners, wise to human folly. But although they are often arrogant, self-absorbed and predictable, they are also susceptible to the weather, and happy to be upstaged by unseasonable storms, torpid nights, fierce sunlight, or the chance of a swim in the limpid sea ...”

“... with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters. Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The appearance of such a being, she thought, might move others to speak and act in ...”

“... to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I am on my way to the prison cell ...”

“... and a sadness, in the prospect of an ambition so large (‘for all mankind’) that it must always be frustrated, and comedy, too, in the rather easy and even proud way that this character accepts his frustration: is he not a little pleased with the ‘tiny black cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may ...”

“... Franklin ‘variety store’. The life-changing pair of panties appeared in a list of goods sold by a garment-industry middleman in New York. The pants were ‘two-barred, tricot satin panties with an elastic waist’ and their price, $2 a dozen, was 50 cents cheaper than that offered by Walton’s current supplier. This ...”

“... shot of the day out of reverence for life, why on earth had he let us come at all? I could not be expected then to understand that it was Sassoon’s besetting trait to repent of any gesture almost as soon as he had made it, to start wanting to extricate himself from any love affair or other allegiance the moment he had embarked on it. He lived in a haze ...”

“... Nothing Dr Bew writes is without interest.’ The wearily Olympian judgment was delivered by a distinctly peeved F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests between large and small tenants as much as the struggle against the landlord oppressor, and casting a cold eye on the cloak of unity that nationalist historiography tried to throw over the enterprise ...”

“... history was shaken in the 1970s and 1980s, and the epicentre was 19th-century art. Emboldened by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other ...”