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“... can be no doubt that it is to this notion, so absurd and bizarre, that we owe the existence of Raphael and Correggio.’ This observation, thrown out by Stendhal in his life of Rossini, deserves the attention of all students of the altarpiece. Most altarpieces, after all, do come from such private chapels and the saints depicted on them determine their ...”

“... On 11 February​ , David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity ...”

“... half of the 20th century. In The Enemy Within, an account of the 1984-85 strike he co-edited, Raphael Samuel claimed that over decades the Scottish and Welsh coalfields produced men with their ‘own distinctive version of militancy – more “educated”, more communist, more statesman-like’ than their English counterparts. One possible expression of ...”

“... among different kinds of writers in the Eighties and early Nineties must be understood. As Raphael Samuel has remarked, it was less Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands War that put questions of patriotism and national identity on the agenda in a new way than the Thatcherites’ dereliction of so many previously-accepted patriotic norms.Yet none of us is immune ...”

“... something much deeper and blacker, that we all respected’. In an obituary of the sculptor David Smith he describes the good times they had and adds: ‘we both knew damned well the black abyss in each of us that the sun and the daughters’ skin and the bounty and the drink could alleviate but not begin to fill, a certain kind, I suppose of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clothing’ – outclassed paintings in the category of pictorial arts: a set of tapestries after Raphael’s designs (woven in gold and silver, to be sure) was valued at nearly triple the price of the artist’s painting, The Holy Family, though Raphael’s were among the most highly sought-after paintings in the ...”

“... that the revolution at the Portrait Gallery had already begun under Strong’s predecessor, David Piper (who went on to become director of the Fitzwilliam and later the Ashmolean Museums). Piper had, after all, sponsored Strong’s first ‘theatrical’ exhibition, ‘The Winter Queen’, while he was still a junior keeper, encouraged him to start ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... latter was our only record Vasari’s enthusiasm would be mysterious in a way that admiration for Raphael’s lost drawing of the Judgment of Paris, for example, which we only know from Marcantonio’s engraving, is not. Titian employed engravers – in particular Cornelis Cort, who learnt to match the light and shade of his paintings in graduated lines and ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... beautiful prints of Vivares, Bartolozzi or Strange, from the pictures of Claude, Caracci, Raphael and Correggio’. Engravers arrived from all over Europe to make their living in London, which became the centre of the European print trade. Engravings shaped public taste, and the printsellers determined what was worth engraving. Edmund Burke referred ...”

“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... with both our Senate seats up for grabs in a run-off that pits the Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, two of the wealthiest members of Congress, against the Democrats Raphael Warnock, a minister in Atlanta, and Jon Ossoff, an investigative journalist who runs a documentary production company. Whichever party wins ...”

“... and Randolph Quirk) jostle with poets and novelists (including Medbh McGuckian and Amy Tan). David Dabydeen writes ‘On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, and discusses, in impeccably establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he ...”