“... part because of the insistence on decking out the female form with lashings of drapery. Only a few masters like Braquehais or the painter Degas (if the attribution is correct) are able to breathe life into these conventions derived from the painter’s studio. The turn of the century brings a reversal: the art nude enters its golden age, while the erotic nude ...”

“... education for all’ was the cry, but the educationalists who raised it were masters of abstract windbaggery – a vague secular religion of moral and spiritual uplift. What it came down to in the end was another year at school, with boys learning to bake a cake and girls to mend a fuse: all very well-meaning, but hardly the stuff of a ...”

“... hens and playing with spinning wheels their husbands are not portrayed as blacksmiths. ‘The old masters’, observed the sculptor John Gibson, ‘represented men thinking, and women tranquil – the Greeks the same.’ Certainly it is true that very few women frown in portraits – frowning being the most obvious way of ...”

“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... as a representative extract for much longer and more elaborate babblings, such as the full text of John Berryman’s ‘Step One’, prelude to the general confession he made for Alcoholics Anonymous, wherein the sufferer relates all the harm he has done himself and others. If the day ever comes when I pin that document above my typewriter, it will be because ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... a tinge of abjection, servants were to be called ‘domestic workers’ and their mistresses and masters would for the first time be ‘employers’. While DWU members wanted ‘a union such as the miners have’, many of their demands reflected the peculiarly intimate nature of living in. Better food, the right to use the same bathrooms as their ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by ...”

“... then sow doubt in an effort to depress it’. Chanos told me he was ‘shown the door by my German masters’. ‘Short selling’ is selling shares or other financial instruments that you don’t own, or own only temporarily – shares, for example, that have been borrowed from another investor. Chanos was – and still is – short selling shares that seem ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... RIA began to change. The live streams of trials stopped. Hope for a rebellion against the new masters faded when a poll inside the organisation showed that some two-thirds of employees didn’t care what ideology prevailed: it was just a job. ‘At Moscow State Journalism School they have people like Deputy Minister of Communications Volin telling ...”

“... source of woe. In exile from Marian England and toiling reluctantly as a corrector in Basel, John Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained ...”

“... in The Wealth of Nations, ‘seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.’ It takes an especially gifted casuist to convert such sentiments into Thatcherspeak, though it can be done. A further incongruity comes into focus in Nicholas Phillipson’s splendid biography: that the 18th-century moral philosopher bore ...”