“... design, nor of its ‘ripe tone’, and she even regrets its limited practicality. Her suitor, a man of some education, is doubtless gratified by the evidence of the conscientious and continuous domestic servitude to which its high polish testifies. But he would not have sublimated this gratification into an aesthetic preference and, although he likens Anna ...”

“... chapter here on Gustave Lanson (a chapter very well done, by Antoine Compagnon), whose Histoire de la Littérature Française, first published in 1895, is in its stiff-necked way the most commanding volume of the sort to have been written in France. Lanson also planned, but never wrote, another, less professorial History, which would be the ‘portrait of ...”

“... Ascherson recorded that between 1896 and 1906, Leopold cleared a personal profit in his ‘domaine de la couronne’ of nearly £3 million – perhaps £500 million in today’s money – from his own businesses and franchise fees. It was largely on these takings that the museum was founded, furnished and redeveloped. This history would have to be ...”

“... irrational act seem rational’). ‘The last 18 years like a bad Dostoevsky novel,’ he wrote to Paul Elmer More in June 1933, on the cusp of his separation from Vivien. In an essay of 1924 he remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters are aware of ‘the grotesque futility of their visible lives, and seem always to be listening for other voices’, which ...”

“... had always been, he now sought to secure his hold on power yet again by presenting himself as the man who could bring peace to the Middle East. But the countries he reached agreements with – the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain – had little interest in Israeli-Palestinian relations. One thing they had in common was that they were all customers of Israeli ...”

“... had more impact had it been published at the time it was written. The assessments of, for example, Paul Wolfowitz – identified by Greenstock as a key influence on the decision to go to war – and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, would have attracted more comment when these figures were more ...”

“... is visible in the dust of controversy, it is the need for a painstaking and precise explication de texte. Without a detailed map of the terrain, the quest for Rabelais’s real meaning is bound to go astray. Even if there is no ‘real’ meaning below the surface, a text as allusively comic and comically allusive as that of Rabelais is bound to be in need ...”

“... Pissarro​, Camille Pissarro’s eldest son, was barely into his teens in the mid 1870s when Paul Cézanne came to live nearby. Nonetheless he retained strong memories of the time, and many years later his brother Paul-Émile wrote down these sentences at Lucien’s dictation:Cézanne lived in Auvers, and he used to ...”

“... spot where Hammershøi painted from his rooms above 67 Great Russell Street. Today it’s Celia Paul who has a studio opposite the museum: ‘When I lie in bed, I am eye-level with the frieze above the door.’ She paints its façade shrouded in blackest brown and electric yellow, a dark imposing monolith from the days of gaslight, dripping with sulphurous ...”

“... the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, in a painting from 1917, surrounded by images of their son, Paul, from the 1920s. On the opposite wall, three works hung together testify to the journey the brooding young man in the self-portrait made in the ensuing three decades. Tate’s Girl in a Chemise from 1905, so familiar ...”

“... simple, namely causing the death of another person. This is murder as one of the fine arts, as De Quincey called it, and here as in the films of Alfred Hitchcock it can only mean an unholy conspiracy between the criminals and the moviemakers, especially the writers, in this case Clouzot and three others. Only an artist, in life or in the cinema, could be ...”

“... Luc Tuymans’s ‘The Walk’ (1993). It was easier than he expected for this aloof, offhand man to escape the scaffold at his trial by dissociating himself from the milieu at whose centre he had been for more than a decade while smoothly inculpating his fellow denizens. There was nothing about his mien which suggested fanaticism or a capacity for ...”

“... claim that ‘what is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself’; Paul Bové patiently, clearly, usefully, explicates Foucault’s employment of the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘genealogy’; Annabel Patterson no less helpfully provides a history of the Intention controversies from Beardsley and Wimsatt on, showing how, since ...”

“... the werewolf myth, the fatal silver bullet, was devised in 1941 for the Hollywood movie The Wolf Man, and the now ubiquitous zombie owes a far greater debt to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels than it does to its Caribbean ancestry. John Blair isn’t overly preoccupied with definitions, though he is keen to make clear that the ...”

“... could sound quite as adulatory about the figure of ‘the Artist’ as Shelley: ‘The moment a man feels or realises himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time,’ he announced in the ‘Manifesto’ to his short-lived periodical, Blast. But more generally, like most of his modernist contemporaries, he set himself noisily against ...”