“... of the Lambs; his obsession with angels (he has an enormous one tattooed on his back) recalls Francis Dolarhyde’s sub-Blakean mysticism; and the shaving-off of all his body hair seems very much the sort of thing that one of Harris’s sexually-disoriented psychopaths would do. Above all, there is the emphasis on ...”

“... Ritter blocked German translations of books by the émigré historians Hans Rosenberg and Francis Carsten in the Fifties). In the next two decades a formidable array of scholars showed how much the Prussian monarchy, landed nobility, army and bureaucracy had contributed to the disastrous course of modern German history. Their mordant view of the Old ...”

“... as they are unpacked tripe by tripe. Their classical attitudes clearly label them as art. Francis Bacon turned his back on art when he used a book about positioning X-ray subjects as a source for his paintings. But even these pictures, while not exactly dignified, fit in the heroic/horrific tradition of Rembrandt’s flayed oxen and anatomy ...”

“... her glass with embarrassment. The joke, Wollheim explains, is that the painting ‘represents a young aspirant whore coolly bidding up the price for her favours, while the beady-eyed madame of the brothel looks on with simulated indifference’. Comparison with other paintings and with captioned prints of the period does suggest that this is indeed a scene ...”

“... in private or without announcement were ‘clandestine’, valid but punishable. When married, young people became independent householders with authority, obligations and social credit. William Gouge observed that by marriage ‘men and women are made husbands and wives. It is the only lawful means to make them fathers and mothers. It is the ordinary ...”

“... seen at least one major fire. When Julius Caesar came to the aid of Cleopatra in her war against young Ptolemy XIII in 48 BC, he burned the ships in Alexandria’s harbour to prevent his enemy from taking the city by sea. In the ensuing conflagration, the warehouses along the docks also caught fire; according to Seneca the Elder, some forty thousand books ...”

“... it was found. We enter upon the early history of intelligence testing. We meet eugenists like Sir Francis Galton and his successor and biographer, Karl Pearson and the now infamous Sir Cyril Burt and a cast of fellow travellers. Even Sidney Webb cagily voiced eugenical arguments while remaining a committed environmentalist. We encounter the first steps ...”

“... to rhetoric and the prosaic presentation has a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture ...”

“... Rubens was like a force of nature. Cézanne invoked the great artificer. Cézanne’s statement to Francis Jourdain that his constant preoccupation had been ‘de rendre sensible la distance réelle entre l’oeil et l’objet’ obviously relates to the feelings about the dangers of closeness expressed in those early poems sent to Zola in which ravishing ...”

“... Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of Weber to an American public, with whom it proved immensely influential – a version that was re-exported back to post-war West Germany as the intellectual ...”

“... magically powered comic-book heroes hurtle, fist-first, into space. Among avant-garde painters, Francis Bacon has been most interested in the potential of foreshortening to endow human bodies with unstable and melting forms. In this he can resemble Correggio. But Bacon, generally looking from above, emphasises the torso, a rubbery mass into which heads sink ...”

“... of William Pynchon. She also accused him of bewitching a cow belonging to Pynchon’s servant Francis Pepper. Another of Pynchon’s servants, Thomas Miller, cut his leg with a saw and immediately assumed that Parsons was responsible. Up to this point, Mary had kept quiet about the fact that she had given herself to the devil and that her soul, leaving ...”

“... intermarriage. Susannah Wedgwood, Charles’s mother, suffered much from boils and bad skin when young. Her father, Josiah, dragged her up to Liverpool for a saltwater bath, a modish therapy. Susannah stoutly resisted the prescription, spending her time playing in the street until she smashed her head on a paving stone. So her father left her at a riverside ...”

“... the Frick Collection in New York and became mesmerised by Giovanni Bellini’s Ecstasy of St Francis. There are touching pages describing the power of this image (some beautiful passages on its chromatic registers) and the resulting fascination the young Elkins developed for the painting. But not a tear in ...”

“... them ideal candidates for the part of the first savages to be ennobled by their defeat. In 1547, a young boy from Tenerife was shipped to Paris by the Spanish and given to the French court as a present. His name was Petrus Gonzales, and to the exoticism of his place of origin was added a hereditary condition that made him a natural curiosity. Gonzales was ...”