“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... W hen​ Francis Ford Coppola won the Razzie Award for Worst Director for his film Megalopolis last year, he responded with a long Instagram caption beneath a zoomed-in photo of his face.I am thrilled to accept the Razzie Award … at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking! In this wreck of a world today, where ART is given scores as if it were professional wrestling, I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules laid down by an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive fifty years from now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Monsall. Roll them around your mouth, savour the tang – vinegary, gutsy, tart. Was this young Burgess’s first experience of the enchantments of language, anticipating his discovery of James Joyce? Burgess was the child of Irish Catholic parents – Anthony was his confirmation name, after St Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things – and he ...”

“... 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 ...”