“... for their work and achieving a higher status for themselves. The interwoven stories of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s career and of the founding of the Royal Academy are designed to tell us of the new power of (some) painters, and the new availability of art. Often at his best when dealing with the questions of cash that too many historians of art and literature ...”

“... it was Malone who, with massive scrupulousness, collected and edited the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Malone who rediscovered Aubrey’s Brief Lives; Malone who wrote the first biography of Dryden based on primary documentary sources; and Malone whose editorial encouragement and insistence finally coaxed his friend Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... in the Louvre and it reopened in 1818 as a gallery for pictures by great living artists (including David, then in political exile). The creation of the first European museum of modern art was thus something of an expedient, but the political impulse behind it was not ephemeral. No subsequent French regime dared to neglect it. Unsurprisingly, the character of ...”

“... and holy … This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heavens ...”

“... and get more than they (or the censor) had reckoned on. It was a location ordeal, with Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight as the leads, and Boorman was at one point thoroughly beaten up by the indignant and much larger James Dickey, author of the original novel, who felt that the veracity of his story was being betrayed – only for it to be later revealed ...”

“... the cannon and the firing-squad against the drawing-room and the kitchen stove. At the end of David Pownall’s book the protagonist and his confidant are shot. At the end of John Hearne’s the leading characters have been respectively drowned, decapitated and disembowelled, and the hero is about to be hanged. Ann Schlee’s story ends with her heroine ...”

“... by rock stars, stylists and designers seeking ideas for sets and costumes on movies like the David Essex vehicle That’ll Be the Day. But McLaren grew tired of nostalgia, feeling ‘lost in dead tissue’ as he later put it, and increasingly frustrated by the small-mindedness of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast ...”

“... as precious stones.’ The ambition is breathtaking, its objects less so. I would like to believe David Erdman that even Pitt guiding Behemoth is meant as Satanic allegory, with its naked British hero putting, as always, an angelic face on Chaos and Non-Entity. But I have my doubts. Perhaps the verdict of time on the Pitt and Nelson pictures – the one, to ...”

“... 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts ...”

“... Annibale and Agostino, who worked in the latter part of the 16th century in Bologna and Rome. Reynolds’s second Discourse gives a notion of how high their reputation stood in 18th-century England (he is addressing the students of the Royal Academy School): It is not an easy task to point out those various excellencies for your imitation which lie ...”

“... dramatised, his master’s compositions. Rembrandt later returned to the subject, at least twice. David de Witt suggests in his catalogue essay that it wasn’t the subject, an exotic conversion story long interpreted in terms of the whitening of the soul by Christian baptism, that encouraged this flurry of painted renditions, so much as the pretext it gave ...”

“... symbolised the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history ...”

“... extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue Velvet) and that she resented Andy Warhol for making millions by turning her face into a silk screen image. What the book doesn’t do is discuss Taylor’s film performances in any depth. This ...”