“... his father-in-law’s death. But there were spectacular achievements in the earlier age, too. Roger Flor, leader of the Catalan companies that overran Frankish Greece, married into the Byzantine imperial family and was hailed in Constantinople with the title ‘Caesar’. Bertrand du Guesclin, the Breton adventurer who led a mixed host of French, Gascon ...”

“... in or outside the courts. While ‘comming out of the church’ in Hunstanworth (Co. Durham), Roger Doon denied Anthony Ratcliff’s accusation that he was a thief. ‘Although ye be a gent., and I a poore man, my honestye shalbe as good as yours.’ Ratcliff was horrified: ‘What saith thou? Liknes thou thy honestye to myn?’ He ‘lyftyd up his hand ...”

“... in a couple of paragraphs and we are told that lack of evidence prevents us from assessing their masters’ treatment of them. This is just not on: Mr Leyser, for example, gives us an illuminating sketch of how lords ritualised their acts of charity to the poor to enhance their own power (though he understands that such acts were more than simply ...”

“... and grey buildings, encased in pompous Doric pilasters, decorated in the mock-classicism which Roger Fry used to call pseudo-art. In Victorian museums, most of the ostentation was on the outside. As we all know, Charles Saatchi made his money in advertising. His museum is so discreet it is almost invisible, a giant hiding behind a row of tiny shops in a ...”

“... through language, but codes of behaviour were also written on the body. One reason dancing masters were so in demand in the 17th and 18th centuries was that they promised to teach deportment – the proper carriage of the body even after the music stopped. Some lapses from bodily decorum were permitted. Tears, for instance, might be acceptable – even ...”

“... coincide with those of the post-colonial theoretical trendies one abhors. It’s rather as though Roger Scruton were to find himself seized by a passionate zest for the minor details of the Marxist-feminist critique of housework. God, Gulliver and Genocide is about ambiguity of motives – about those unstable mixtures of racism and anti-racism, collusion and ...”

“... and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid ...”

“... classicist reactionary’. He disapproved of T.S. Eliot’s obscurity: ‘the practice of the masters showed,’ he claimed, ‘that the best poems had been written simply and comprehensibly about simple feelings and ideas.’ His first collection, Winter Movement, appeared in 1930 (like Auden’s Poems) and was made up largely of fairly traditional ...”

“... Christ. Degas himself left these paintings unfinished and began to direct his attention to other masters, but Piero was not forgotten in France. Gustave Moreau claimed that Puvis de Chavannes had been in Italy with Degas in the late 1850s. There seems to be no other evidence that he visited the country after 1848 but he certainly had a close knowledge of the ...”

“... denotes a servant (which as a dog-lover who is aware of the autonomy of those in service to their masters I could never quite accept); snakes indicate, well, snakes; larger beasts tend to connote that their people are creatures of excitement and fear. According to one online test my own daemon is a scarlet macaw. According to another it is a wildcat, although ...”

“... Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ‘flatness’ demanded of Modernist painting by Clement Greenberg). Jasper Johns had played a similar trick with his paintings of flags, targets and numbers in the mid to ...”

“... faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home. Even without the ‘nothing else’ this is a pretty hyperbolic proposition. With the ‘nothing else’ it turns into a form of madness, a suggestion that we shall not grow old at all unless we keep failing to receive the ...”

“... especially, were very eccentric indeed. While still in place, covertly betraying their Eastern masters from Moscow or Warsaw, their information was thrifty and to the point. When they bolted to the West, which usually meant months spent at some guarded farmhouse in Virginia surrounded by crew-cut CIA interrogators of limited imagination, they rapidly ...”

“... and with increasing licence, the anti-masquers decked themselves in the attributes of venerable masters and indulged unrestrained for the shrieking crowd, throughout the night, the imitation of their quirks, their manners and their vices. Only at the University Gate, beyond the pitching fires of tapers and torches, did the crowd hush its cheering, and ...”

“... on Berenson in this book came from Mrs Berenson – above all from a letter in which she warned Roger Fry about the difficulties of resuming good relations with her husband. It begins by sounding like the sort of explanation we have to endure from the owners of vicious dogs or the mothers of beastly children. ‘At the bottom of everything is a curious ...”