“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... left-wing party, the PSOE, and the coalition government headed by Pedro Sánchez, its leader. Pope Francis had died a couple of days earlier, on Easter Monday, and the group spoke about the abiding power of the Church over Spanish education, healthcare and finance. They described the religious parades of Easter week as annual rituals of cultish ...”

“... slabs of cooked meat but never to swallow them. He later claimed this volume had been inspired by Francis Bacon’s paintings. The brutal way of regarding his own body, prefigured in the suggestively titled La Mort propagande, was fully developed only in his last Aids books. A collection of Guibert’s photographs, Le Seul Visage, begins with a startling ...”

“... as typical – ‘he’s fucking her and she’s/Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm’. The young people’s pre-Aids freedom from moral constraints, assessed with brutality but also an angry humour, sets them down in ‘paradise’ – at least in the envious eyes of ‘everyone old’ watching ‘everyone ...”

“... the only new recruit made in the 20th century to the first rank of Old Masters was (as the late Francis Haskell pointed out) Georges de La Tour, whose brilliantly lit pickpocket and solemn, candlelit Magdalen both derive from Caravaggio’s inventions. The reassessment of Caravaggio was in part due to the advent of loan exhibitions, to the cleaning and ...”

“... or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie.’ Cavell, whose own ‘odd education’ took place in part at the Berkeley cinemas where Kael worked as a programmer, put it in more positive terms: ‘To be drowning in the ...”

“... a female. As it happens, the first 126 Sonnets are formally now described as addressing a ‘Fair Young Man’, perhaps aristocratic by birth: and some of them do indeed use male connotations for their subject, just as the last 28 poems plainly allude to a female. But the fact is that Sonnet 57 achieves its strenuous precision by telling us nothing ...”

“... queen’ until her death in 1252, leaving the king’s wife, Margaret, to be described as ‘the young queen’. Blanche’s early regency was not, as far as we know, ever formally ended. When Louis went crusading in 1248 he made his mother regent again. Blanche’s background in the Spanish reconquista might explain a lot of her son’s behaviour. His ...”

“... has never been ‘renowned as convivial company’. Has he ever dined with Mr Heath, one wonders? Francis Pym is criticised for ‘publishing a bitter book of self-justification’ immediately after being sacked as Foreign Secretary. That opinion would not survive even a cursory reading of The Politics of Consent. Yet Mr Horne is generally pretty fair, and he ...”

“... that so simple a molecule could specify genetic information, but its role became clear when Francis Crick and Jim Watson in Cambridge determined its three-dimensional structure. Their famous double helix showed how the genetic information is written on DNA and how it is copied every time a cell divides. Some years after this, scientists also deciphered ...”

“... is instructive to compare it with that masterpiece of invention, Larkin’s poem on looking at a young girl’s photograph album.’ The comparison isn’t made, so the instruction is hypothetical, but Bayley’s general patience is clarified by what it has to put up with in Ashbery’s Shadow Train. Bayley has defended his criteria in several other ...”

“... New York, bizarre conjunctions, an affair with Lady Q., a bit of bohemian life in London – ‘In Francis Bacon’s queer after-hours club’ – and one Pericles Belleville. At a very formal dinner party, At which I met the woman I have loved the most In my life, Belleville Pulled out a sterling silver-plated revolver And waved it around, pointing it at ...”