“... in Württemberg when his ducal patron died … there were many success stories of bankers and mint masters who survived the perils to become stupendously rich.’ The half-line dismissal of Süss Oppenheimer’s career is particularly striking, because his rapid rise and spectacular fall is so revealing of the dynamics within Christian society that created ...”

“... transcriptions from de Mailla’s 18th-century Histoire générale de la Chine and the writings of John Adams, the head of a great Confucian American dynasty. What awaited them now was a reviving cocktail of Pound’s trademark bohemian-pantheism. The inspiration for the Pisan Cantos was a visionary encounter on a hillside near Sant’ Ambrogio with a barefoot ...”

“... though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity easy, least of all the crew of Apollo 11, for whom there were no predecessors to show them how it was done. Caught between a ...”

“... locations ahead, and waited for them to make a move.The impetuosity of Allied generals, and their masters in Washington and Whitehall, was gradually tempered by this reality. Their armies soon faced another string of defences – the Gustav Line – transecting Italy from the Garigliano River in the west to Ortona in the east, through the Apennines and across ...”

“... ditch, while another (a dancing master, maybe) skips into the limelight. The Elizabethan satirist John Marston was repeatedly mocked for his line ‘Let custards quake, my rage must freely run,’ but his opposition between a wobbling but self-contained cowardly custard (he is thinking of a set custard rather than a sauce) and his own free-flowing inspired ...”

“... already naked, prune-like eyes staring and an undraped bed right next to him. In 1946 the old masters of the camera, on the other hand, were wearing wrinkled shirt-sleeves without neckwear, the skinny Stieglitz lolling and polishing his glasses, a white lock falling over his brow, his glittering gaze fixed beyond us; the plump Flaherty with his hands on ...”

“... world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art’, came with a plan ‘to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course’. Berenson urged him to ‘look, look, look, until you are blind with looking, and out ...”

“... and profits by what has been done in a variety of schools and by a number of very different masters. He describes his own procedure as ‘trying to make not so much “high” as rich and flexible art out of traditional and vernacular materials.’ He is also, no doubt, describing his own style when he writes that ‘the central and best tendency of ...”

“... aspect of sex. The process culminated in Havelock Ellis and Freud in the 19th century, and in Masters and Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that a suffocating blanket of prudery had for ...”

“... and which came to them by various routes from Caravaggio, would not have suited her. The painter John Opie is reported to have found Vigée Le Brun’s pictures good in ‘the imitation of particular things, velvet, silk etc’ but he also remarked that they gave him ‘no high pleasure as works of art’. Hoppner, more brutally, found even her way with ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... to the standard of Einstein or Jeffrey Archer in this galaxy alone. So where are they all? When John Logie Baird invented television, he also invented a microwave messaging system broadcast through interstellar space. For forty years, programmes like I Love Lucy and Rawhide and Dynasty have been spearheading planet Earth’s attempt to get in ...”

“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of ...”

“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...”

“... a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive fooling around that recalls the fun dances, which are also dangerous games, shared by the narrator and her friend Tracey in Swing Time (2016), or the goofing off that always says something about what it is to be ...”