“... Willem de Kooning​’s Suburb in Havana was painted in 1958. The canvas seems to have had its first showing at Sidney Janis’s gallery in New York, part of an exhibition called Eight American Painters that opened on 5 January 1959. Four days before, on New Year’s Day, Fidel Castro’s forces entered Havana. It had been clear for much of 1958 that the Batista regime was falling apart, with street fighting moving in from the suburbs of Havana all through the winter months ...”

“... There is​ a moment towards the end of King Lear – many readers and playgoers have found it almost unbearable – when the mad king enters, holding his daughter’s corpse in his arms. ‘Lend me a looking glass,’ Lear says, ‘If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,/Why then she lives.’ Two of his subjects respond, with questions that go on resonating down the centuries: Kent: Is this the promised end? Edgar: Or image of that horror? Silent protestors in Calcutta in 2007 ...”

“... Velázquez’s​ Aesop was painted most likely in the late 1630s, as part of the decor of the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid. It would be good to know something of its original place in the building, or at least be sure that the Torre was its first destination, but as usual with Velázquez the court records are mute ...”

“... I felt as if I had been plunged into a sea of wine of thought, and must drink to drowning. But the first distinct impression which fixed itself on one was that of the entire superiority of Painting to Literature as a test, expression and record of human intellect, and of the enormously greater quantity of Intellect which might be forced into a picture – and read there – compared with what might be expressed in words ...”

“... Lucien Pissarro​, Camille Pissarro’s eldest son, was barely into his teens in the mid 1870s when Paul Cézanne came to live nearby. Nonetheless he retained strong memories of the time, and many years later his brother Paul-Émile wrote down these sentences at Lucien’s dictation:Cézanne lived in Auvers, and he used to walk three kilometres to come and work with father ...”

“... There are the Alps,’ Basil Bunting is supposed to have scribbled on his copy of the Cantos. ‘What is there to say about them?’ Mainly this, in the brief poem that follows: They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree ... It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps, fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble! Well, yes, I guess I shall end up scribbling much the same thing ...”

“... People talk​ of painted eyes in portraits that ‘follow you round the room’. T.J. Clark, in the third of the six essays collected in his new book, Heaven on Earth, strangely inverts this. Studying the hall depicted in Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage (now in Edinburgh), he senses that a painted figure’s eyes – eyes that are out of sight – are moving across the space, their attention straying sideways ...”

“... criterion level’. But these are old-fashioned issues. Onwards to Raqqa and Mosul! T.J. Clark For​ ‘Yes’ voters 19 September was a very dreich day. A 6 per cent swing would have made all the difference; but it didn’t happen. Older voters tended to be the most staunchly Unionist: time may not be on the Union’s side. As yet, despite the ...”

“... Impressionism became very quickly the house style of the haute bourgeoisie,’ T.J. Clark observes at the close of The Painting of Modern Life. Few seem to have resisted the invitations of Madame Verdurin or to have hesitated to adopt the pseudo-Rococo frame with whitened gilding. Renoir, in particular, who had begun his career decorating porcelain, ended it providing upper-class wall-ornaments ...”

“... in the summer of 1912, or is it a mad altarpiece of some sort, ‘an unholy polyptych’, as T.J. Clark calls it, with its wings unfolded as if ‘for Easter or Pentecost’, the ensemble crowned by The Poet, ‘raised high in place of the pantocrator’? And what should we make of this mixture of farce and metaphysics, a mixture raffishly recapitulated in ...”

“... period, and especially on French painting from Courbet to Cézanne. Here the writings of T.J. Clark have been particularly influential: starting with two books on Courbet and the art of the Second Republic – Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois (both 1973) – and more recently with The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and ...”

“... T.J.​ Clark begins If These Apples Should Fall with a restaging of his first encounter with Cézanne, when as a 15-year-old in 1958 he was amazed by a reproduction of The Basket of Apples: ‘I think I can retrieve the feeling even sixty years later.’ This is one version of ‘the present’ in his subtitle, the summoning of a then of Cézanne painting and Clark looking into a now of his writing and our reading ...”

“... interest in the museum, so it is refreshing to find that one of the most eminent among them, T.J. Clark, was diverted from his vague plans to work on modern art (‘It was not clear what would occupy my time . . . the most likely bet was Picasso between the wars’) by one of the most beautiful paintings in the Getty Museum, Poussin’s The Calm, and by ...”

“... Ezra Pound’s Cantos, ‘you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them.’ T.J. Clark is an Alpinist of distinction: Courbet, Manet, Pollock, Poussin, no foothills, no detours (apart from Lowry). And now Picasso. There are the Alps. ‘They don’t make sense,’ Bunting claimed. But Pound made sense. Some people still understand him. The ...”

“... seems to be involved, notably the set of allegories in the National Gallery discussed by T.J. Clark (LRB, 3 April). Given the difficulty of obtaining loans and the need to mount a large exhibition, in the National Gallery a strong selection of works of the highest quality is diluted by others of only marginal interest. This is true particularly of the ...”