“... in hardened clay, back from the planet you discovered but never had time to name.If Michael risks grand whines, Matthew risks producing regular-guy monologues, like any number of affable poets from America’s 1990s (Campbell McGrath, for example). Matthew aspires To walk barefoot on the cold stone and know that the woman you love is also walking barefoot on ...”

“... strange for so rarely seeing the light of day. In such little explored shadowy corners we find Sarah Wedgwood, the last surviving daughter of Josiah and Sally, living alone. Sarah was tall, thin, solemn and sad, but above all remarkably fastidious. She was so fastidious that she kept special pairs of gloves for ...”

“... is richer in eccentricity and event than that of Harrison? Where Lowell can boast a Great Aunt Sarah thundering ‘on the keyboard of her dummy piano’ and ‘risen like the phoenix / from her bed of trouble-some snacks and Tauchnitz classics’, Harrison’s relations are more familiar figures, bickering on Blackpool’s Golden Mile or locked into their ...”

“... which is Royal Ballet-speak for asked to leave. ‘At assessment time everyone’s so stressed,’ Sarah, a former student there told me. ‘Everyone stops eating.’ (This isn’t just nerves. As the school’s guidance on eating disorders puts it, ballet dancers are ‘aesthetic athletes’ whose appearance ‘is a part of their performance’.) In any ...”

“... the bolt hole Turner the famous painter had in the character of Turner, common-law husband of Sarah Danby and father of two daughters by her, or, later, Turner, alias Booth (sometimes Admiral Booth), common-law husband of Mrs Booth in Chelsea. His domestic relations with these women are undocumented. Negligible provision was made for them in his various ...”

“... about on very high heels like some bright-plumaged bird’. It is not that Hyman’s Bonnard or Sarah Whitfield’s essay in the Tate catalogue – both excellent, and usefully complementing each other – gives a very different account of the relationship from the one that limited anecdotal evidence had built up in the years since Bonnard’s death ...”

“... a record $728,000 and shipped out to California, where it hangs alongside Lawrence’s portrait of Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton, known as ‘Pinkie’ (and best avoided on a full stomach). Blue Boy was painted sometime around 1770, when Gainsborough was living in Bath. For many years, the sitter was identified as Jonathan Buttall, the son of a London ...”

“... gusto, but when easy familiarity is what you are trying to convey, gush is to be avoided. Full of grand meals served and consumed at chapter length, Princess Daisy reads like Buddenbrooks without the talent. Food is important to Mrs Krantz: so important that her characters keep turning into it, when they are not turning into animals. Daisy has a half-brother ...”

“... home and husband is thrust on her. The protagonists of The Tinker’s Wedding are more proactive. Sarah has resolved to raise her social status a notch or two by marrying Michael, properly, in church. The farce of the play consists of the couple’s frustrating attempts to negotiate financial terms with a passing priest and then to keep to them; at the ...”

“... a value and a dignity to human nature’ – the pursuit, in short, of history painting in the grand style, the highest of the genres of high art, which he himself pursued, but which few other artists in Britain, so he believed, had a taste sufficiently elevated to attempt. By his mid-career, Hogarth had become thoroughly impatient with all the ...”

“... man, or snatches from his conversation, Churchill’s perceptions dominate the narrative. If the Grand Old Man asserts that the Attlee Government has brought the country to the brink of economic ruin, or destroyed Britain’s position as a great power, there is no one to confirm or contradict him, or put his remarks in context. What Churchill ...”

“... scratch. The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) was a collaboration between Collier and her friend Sarah Fielding, author of the sentimental novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and contributor to her brother Henry’s Joseph Andrews (1742). They had worked together before – Collier wrote a preface for the 1753 sequel to David Simple, and in 1749 they ...”

“... It is only to be expected that most of the book should concentrate on Churchill’s direction of grand strategy and his relations with Roosevelt and Stalin. But as prime minister Churchill had many other problems on his hands. His War Cabinet, with its various Cabinet committees, was in charge of an economy mobilised for total war. Subjects like the import ...”

“... Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in neoclassical muslin and dramatically backlit, would suddenly turn her head and the ...”

“... of anguished loss at the end of the friendship. The larks she had with another bad-girl artist, Sarah Lucas, still radiate girl power, and the grandmother whom she called ‘Plum’ and who called her ‘Pudding’, fills her memories of growing up with genuine lovingness. She sought out Louise Bourgeois towards the very end of Bourgeois’s long life, and ...”