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“... included 71 prints engraved from Biblical pictures by contemporary artists such as Joshua Reynolds, and so offers more to the aesthetic bibliophile than those versions that people actually read. Ugly and mass-produced certainly applies to the Geneva Bible, the most influential English book ever. It was translated by Protestant exiles in Geneva in the ...”

“... with more accuracy than people writing in less workaday genres. So she has Lizzy dealing with Mrs Reynolds, who helps her keep house, Thomas Bidwell, who polishes her candlesticks, and Mrs Donovan, who looks after her children. And she has Lizzy worrying about Napoleon, remedying a lack of interest in the world that modern critics have thought disappointing ...”

“... In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of an entire ensemble in a few well-chosen words, and of accurately rendering the way dress affects feeling. James, we learn, is at his most quicksilvery when writing about clothes ...”

“... published, so that the world should know, not only that England was golden with the accession of Henry VIII, but also that Erasmus had been summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and ...”

“... Annibale and Agostino, who worked in the latter part of the 16th century in Bologna and Rome. Reynolds’s second Discourse gives a notion of how high their reputation stood in 18th-century England (he is addressing the students of the Royal Academy School): It is not an easy task to point out those various excellencies for your imitation which lie ...”

“... who he could claim ‘belong’ to us, or that were ‘ours’. Under the letter ‘V’ he lists Henry Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the ...”

“... special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than his beloved Henry James) and meets the love of his life, a unique Greek called Nikos Stangos. The boys were fascinated by Bloomsbury – the books, the people, the scarves, the gossip – which led them to venerate Stephen Spender as one of its last links. Squeezed into a ...”

“... in the state in which he possessed and left them.’The presence of a one-volume collection of Henry More’s Philosophical Poems, Platonic Song of the Soul (‘fine copy, gilt edges’) and a ‘good sound copy’ of Speght’s 1598 Chaucer added to the collection’s value. But so, paradoxically, did the battered condition of the other books. Lamb’s ...”

“... birth has condemned her: but she is also admired as a work of art, and is soon painted by Romney, Reynolds and others, for her stock-in-trade is her extraordinary beauty, a classical perfection of face and figure that is another kind of accident of birth. It is a pattern that recurs throughout her prime. To the connoisseurs and dilettanti of the ...”

“... and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all – and, of course ...”

“... done so, it is not clear that, left to themselves, they have left themselves much to say. It was Henry Sidgwick who best exposed the pretension. And it was Sidgwick who, from well beyond the grave, did as much as anyone to keep the subject out of Cambridge. Yet he was not an obvious enemy. In the 1860s he had lectured on philosophy and political theory in ...”

“... Leigh Hunt – one or another is bound to be in the audience. Besides, the solid diarists like Henry Crabb Robinson or Farington will have made an entry: if all else fails, Fanny Burney will have been told what went on at a first night by someone less squeamish in the choice of entertainment. And for a little filling-in of background information, there is ...”

“... no great collectors with the single-mindedness, determination and coherence of industrialists like Henry Tate, Samuel Courtauld or Burrell. Aristocrats have never cared greatly for living artists, except for those who could paint portraits of themselves, their families, their horses and their dogs – although the ways in which the likes of Stubbs, ...”

“... it too will have been elected for nought.) And the platoon’s roll still goes on, with David Reynolds on 1940 (not this book’s finest chapter), Henry Pelling on ‘... and the Labour Movement’ (Commies are included), Max Beloff on ‘... and Europe’, and Sarvepalli Gopal on ‘... and India’ – Gopal ...”

“... couldn’t get the hang of looking through the prism or didn’t like the drawings they produced. Henry Fox Talbot’s response, which he noted in The Pencil of Nature, was typical:I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of Lake Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the ...”