“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... Van Ryn, a brash, genial American multimillionaire, and the comparatively colourless Englishman Richard Eaton, supposedly a self-portrait. The plot (a hunt for tsarist treasure, a Bolshevik scheme for world domination – plus a bit of romance) is a helter-skelter mess. Wheatley liked to talk about his ‘snakes and ladders’ technique: in effect, a ...”

“... reached the Brothers’ chapel. Documents from a few years later speak to Leonardo haggling over price. His stock had risen in the 1480s, the painting seems to have been seen from the start as something unprecedented and wonderful (the Louvre’s is the version copyists soon fastened on), and it may well be that a courtier or emissary had made him a better ...”

“... years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the jurist Richard Falk, September 11 saw a terrible departure from the norm that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, so it was said, the right to make war – the jus ad bellum – came under strict legal control: World War Two ended with the ...”

“... or Jerusalem, was often prescribed to those hoping to be rid of leprosy, cataract or epilepsy. Richard Esty’s medical manual of 1454 includes a long pilgrim’s travel guide advising on overnight stops, exchange rates and potential routes between England and Jerusalem. Long journeys in unfamiliar circumstances, away from domestic and economic ...”

“... Tom, so ready to lighten your load and share your pain – who gave us fair warning about the price to be paid for messing with popularity. ‘We persist,’ he wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable ...”

“... rationalist world. Perhaps the artwork was the one thing left that had a value rather than a price, and didn’t exist for the sake of something else. Like God, poems and symphonies existed just for the hell of it. As the idea of God was gradually ousted, art was on hand to fill his shoes. Like him, it was a repository of absolute value. Like ...”

“... The sooner goods could be sold or swapped or spirited to a friend, the harder they were to trace. Richard Rich, a mariner twice hauled before the Golden Grape inquiry, eventually remembered a great many pieces of eight he had ‘forgotten to express’, having given them ‘to Mary Paine, a young woman living in Melcombe Regis, to keep for him’.Salvagers ...”

“... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...”

“... as Tonnard’s website states, it’s ‘a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible’. Some may scoff, but it turned out to be a shrewd investment, since it is now sold out, and used copies are changing hands on eBay for larger sums. There is also an accompanying set of postcards, ‘Highlights in the History of The Invisible ...”

“... for a horse, but Joseph bought the animal himself, and barefacedly informed Turner that the price was now £11. Turner kept his diary for 11 years from his mid-twenties, while he was the mercer – keeper of the general store – of the Sussex village of East Hoathly. His parents were shopkeepers in nearby Framfield, and the only two of Thomas’s sons ...”

“... From then on I was just in the art world. Artists in New York – Barbara Kruger, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, David Salle – had begun to purloin images; and here, too, Acker found parallels for her own techniques of appropriation. On the Lower East Side others began to cross-hatch avant-gardism with porn, pulp and schlock, the lower reaches of popular ...”

“... of Klimt and Schiele to a position near Picasso in the Temple of Fame, or at least in the Art Price Index. De Pury once belonged to a partnership that did much to supply Ronald Lauder, who founded the Neue Galerie in New York and helped revise our understanding of the artistic importance of Vienna a hundred-odd years ago, yet his book contains next to ...”

“... rate – it’s fixed in euros, but paid in pounds – it’s more stable and reliable than the price of wheat, which, in the past nine years, has twice doubled and twice halved, sometimes from one year to the next. Since he became a Ukip MEP in 2009 Agnew has relinquished day to day running of the farm to his wife, Diana, who deals with their 35,000 ...”

“... Gasp at the scale model. Blush at the hubris of the promotional displays. Giant blow-ups of ‘Richard Rogers’s original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome ...”