“... not in evidence here. The earliest exhibit at Dulwich is a small painting from 1908, Saxon Sydney-Turner at the Piano. It has something of Sargent’s slickness, though not put to quite the same effect (she liked filling in where he liked trailing off) and shows Sydney-Turner in profile at his instrument: the flair of his ...”

“... infinitely dense thing. And that … had kind of exploded.’ He collaborated with his friend Mark Costello on Signifying Rappers (1990), an odd, fizzy book about ‘serious rap’ and ‘the “postmodern” inversion’. He started, and abandoned, a PhD at Harvard. He booked himself into hospital with suicidal thoughts. And then things started going ...”

“... keep a straight face when trafficking in absurdity, though she throws in an occasional exclamation mark, and she is resolutely fair to an exotic who would today be baited routinely. Glyn’s novels, she assures us, ‘continue to inspire readers’, though it is hard to know who these may be. A further glance at the reference shelf shows that Mrs Leavis, in ...”

“... he has walled himself into Liechtenstein instead of walling others out. Bower’s book bears the mark of two foreign connections, having been ‘set in Hong Kong, printed in Finland’. This, apparently, was part of a security plan by the publishers to conceal the operation from the largest printer in Europe. (The largest printer in Europe got the Haines ...”

“... the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck of stories less mythical perhaps but in their own ways all as interesting and sui generis as that of Sid ...”

“... grown up with. Thus Constable’s Suffolk, Cézanne’s Provence and Eardley’s Catterline. (Even Turner, a great exception, might at a pinch be reckoned to have a single subject: changing light and weather.) In her land and seascapes Eardley knifes, drips and brushes paint with broad gestures which (to pick on another comparison of limited ...”

“... oddest ceremony in the history of the post-war White House was that devised by President Truman to mark the founding in 1946 of the CIG (forerunner of the CIA established in the following year). The President presented his guests with black cloaks, black hats and wooden daggers, then called his chief of staff forward and stuck a large black moustache firmly on ...”

“... are not the only sort, however. The best stories attach to men who threw up arches and obelisks to mark their territory, annoy their neighbours and puzzle posterity. Archaeology now supports the famous story about Mad Jack Fuller, who one night rashly bet that the spire of Dallington Church could be seen from his windows. Morning showed a hill stood in the ...”

“... be the better word – among historians of British art in its ‘great century’, from Hogarth to Turner, was about landscape. But whatever the differences between them, the most vocal participants in this debate were all finally on the same side, arguing with a largely silent (either stunned or indifferent) opposition to establish that there was a politics ...”

“... Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and was elected to Congress in 1890. By 1901, however, when Hughes was born, the ...”

“... A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English humour’ too. He was too near academe to be a cracker-barrel philosopher. His style was zestful, easy and lucid, free from tags and tired ...”

“... the clothes that F. Scott Fitzgerald dresses his heroines in . . . Maybe he saw it as a mark of his masculinity to leave out the details . . . Surely Zelda would have told us these things?’ That the revelation or otherwise of detail might be an artistic decision – that writers might be working to ambitions broader than those involved in ...”

“... face with muffins and Coca-Cola’ in the café next door to her expensive school. Only two things mark out Valentine from the other rich, pretty, sad girls in the café by the crammer. She has no internet presence at all, no Facebook or Instagram, no nothing, and when Lucie plants a doctored phone on her she never switches it on. And then, in the Metro one ...”

“... time to look back with some astonishment on the ordinary arrangements of the day. Consider W.J. Turner – admittedly a new and uncertain driver – driving to Warminster in second gear and not unnaturally ‘arriving with the engine red-hot’, which did not prevent his loyal wife asserting that ‘Walter is a splendid driver already.’ Consider Sassoon ...”

“... Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees his organisation’s ‘creative future’ as one of ‘Martini media … available when and where you want it, with content moving freely between different devices and platforms’. As well as the weekly ...”