“... be made. ‘Window, Finsbury Park’ (1933) Born in 1908, Pasmore started out as a part-time painter. The sudden death of his father when Pasmore was 18 threw him off his intended course from Harrow to university; instead he took a job with the London County Council. Painting and educating himself about art in his spare time, he began to exhibit in the ...”

“... the girl sleeping off a hangover out of something thicker and more oppressive than air. While George Bellows’s 1924 picture of a boxing match is lively, populist documentary, Carlo Carrà’s Leaving the Theatre of 1909 already gives a radical account of appearance: feathery marks are woven into bright cocoons of colour which allow you to sustain for ...”

“... from The Grocery Shop by Gerrit Dou (1613-75), now in the Queen’s Collection – bought by George IV for 1000 guineas in 1817. Dou’s reputation (and prices) were then still high. He gave tremendous value. He attended closely to the play of light as it came through a window or was thrown out by a candle. He rendered the textures of wood, metal, fabric ...”

“... In her first public writing after her elopement with George Henry Lewes in 1854, George Eliot compared the position of women in England and in France: ‘in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred ...”

“... writer has not only read her Bible, but is aware of many poets ancient and modern, most notably George Barker. One can’t talk sensibly about Smart’s prose without saying something about George Barker’s early poetry. ‘His prescription is – Excess: he will rage himself out,’ said Barker’s early friend and ...”

“... very proud & dear for me.’ The 154 letters they exchanged – 80 published for the first time in George Allan Cate’s thoroughly introduced and annotated collection – shed agreeable light on the friendship of the two Victorian sages who strikingly resembled each other in some ways and yet in others were polar opposites. Both were of Scottish descent, but ...”

“... 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven or eight years – George Stubbs in 1984; Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting in 1987; Wright of Derby last year. None of these was quite as blandly factual as Constable, nor so studiously innocent of the desire to situate the objects on display within a context wider ...”

“... not even Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket or Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon, which were among the National Gallery’s most remarkable recent acquisitions. Dickens was certainly familiar with the paintings of Charles Eastlake, the keeper of the National Gallery between 1843 and 1847. Eastlake was the leading British ...”

“... of the period. An infrared reflectogram (which makes the under-drawing visible) showed that the painter had had trouble with the position of the feet (so the picture isn’t, as Bernard Berenson suggested, a copy). Attributed to Umberto Giunti, ‘Madonna of the Veil’, 1920-29 Then there is the Madonna of the Veil, bought expensively by Lord Lee of ...”

“... grieving for his wife, instead of vice versa, he instals poetry as the agent of knowing. ‘The Painter and the Fish’, a rich and witty version of Carver’s aesthetic, associates art with the need and lust for cognition: All day he’d been working, like a locomotive. I mean he was painting, the brush strokes coming like clockwork. Then he called ...”

“... geology and English: ‘I never quite got a grip on these subjects,’ he said in a review of George Landow’s Hypertext in 1992, ‘but the memory of what it is like to do philosophy or geology remains; and when I read about debates that are going on in these areas I believe I know, even if I cannot follow it all, what kind of row or celebration is ...”

“... stake himself out as the Fleming among those exactingly descriptive northern Netherlanders, a painter louder and more flamboyant, offering a glint of Rubens stardust.Hals’s flash is the flash of the passing moment. He has an unsurpassed grip on what’s transitory: smiles, cackles, a boy sticking out his tongue, a man tilting his chair so far back that ...”

“... is high-contrast black and white, best set the scene for his paintings. The paintings of George Bellows, say, who earlier recorded the look of urban America, do not imply narratives in the way Hopper’s do. His magazine illustrations and the drawings he made for his paintings have much in common. Both make you think about what is going on, what ...”

“... and images, The Artist’s Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew ...”

“... Wharton territory. John Campton, the central figure, is a fashionable and successful American painter, living in Paris as tension mounts during the summer of 1914. He is divorced, and awaiting the arrival of his 25-year-old son George, the only child of a ‘stupid and ill-fated marriage’ with the polished and ...”