“... of the unease which, despite the best efforts of art historians, much 17th-century painting in the grand manner produces in modern eyes may lie in perceptual as well as in cultural embarrassment. A laconic note from David Hockney prefaces Paul Joyce’s conversations with him. It ends: ‘My photographer friends said it ...”

“... worshipped at least one of its characters, the girl Candace, bluntly called the whole novel ‘a grand failure’. However, indulgence is the virtually unavoidable frailty of all scholarly biographers who live too long too closely with their subject, noting, spying, checking, watching, loving, quarrelling, confessing, agreeing for year after year; and this ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... etc’. He went to Monte Carlo, for the casino rather than the society: he made no effort to meet grand people in the area such as Somerset Maugham, Picasso or Matisse. Bacon’s new fame and his energetic enjoyment of postwar freedom meant that he had less time for Eric Hall, the Tory councillor, who wasn’t interested in Soho pubs or edgy artists and ...”

“... society was what gave his life meaning, and it’s thanks to his fascination with the rich and the grand that he left such an intimate record. The life Channon describes with such loving relish now seems as remote as Saint-Simon’s Versailles. When he wasn’t visiting country houses and playing sardines – ‘For an hour [at Hackwood] Ld Londonderry, Lady ...”

“... attempt to hide epileptic seizures. The illness was in the family; Dickinson’s nephew, Ned, had grand mal seizures for which Austin unreasonably blamed Sue. Dickinson too suffered from illnesses, Gordon notes. She believes that the cough generally supposed to account for Dickinson’s temporary withdrawal from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was no ...”

“... problem in King of the Badgers, it’s a sort of astigmatism. Hensher has said that he took no grand decision not to include any gay characters in The Northern Clemency, but felt that after a certain point their introduction would unbalance the narrative. He was specifically addressing the reader’s experience of the book: a single gay character in a ...”

“... traffic could be a means of preventing competitors from gaining supplies. It would be part of a grand design to halt the trade, and Britain during the war was mistress of the seas. A standstill would perpetuate her superiority in slave-ownership in the West Indies. After the war agitation revived, in favour now of abolition of slavery itself in British ...”

“... fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of almost every ...”

“... and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The opportunities at court, however, were limited ...”

“... high boredom threshold. Indisputably the greatest game ever written for the BBC was Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell. The aim was to travel through eight galaxies, each with 32 solar systems, trading cargo, battling enemies and becoming a steadily more feared space pirate. Not only were you able to save your progress as you went along, but the game ...”

“... legacy of former prosperity: handsomely endowed colleges, art schools, museums, galleries; grand houses grown shabby and cheap to rent; derelict warehouses and empty factories, easily repurposed as rehearsal or performance spaces.’ But in his writing about the bands there is an element of repetition; his comprehensiveness – the curse perhaps of too ...”

“... here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he continues: ‘But then I never read Rabelais either though nobody will believe ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”