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“... Lady Constance Leslie met Millais at the exhibition, head bowed. ‘Ah, Lady Constance,’ he said, ‘you see me unmanned. Well, I’m not ashamed to say that on looking at my earliest pictures I have been overcome with chagrin that I failed to fulfil the forecast of my youth.’ There is more than one way to read this anecdote, first told by Holman ...”

“... novelists rested comfortably in the routines that had brought them success in the past, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) was always committed to experimentation. He was his own pitiless taskmaster, working for money as strenuously as a starveling, and received £30,000 from Routledge for a 15-year option on his novels. He wrote successful silver-fork ...”

“... 1904, his daughter Virginia lay in bed, listening to the birds singing in Greek and imagining King Edward lurking naked in the azaleas, shouting obscenities; that same summer she apparently attempted to kill herself by leaping out of the window. ‘I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,’ she wrote to a friend when the crisis had passed. And ...”

“... savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero ...”

“... I’m not a very nice man, you know,’ L.S. Lowry said of himself. Mrs Marshall, his friend, would not disagree. Although for the last 14 years of his life she and her husband spent some part of almost every day in his company, she now describes him as having been ‘a millstone round our necks’. No blame attaches to her for not subscribing to the old idea that if you are creative you need not be nice, but it’s usual for people to like their friends ...”

“... The power of central bankers – about which Edward Luttwak wrote in the LRB of 14 November – arises not just from their control over important aspects of economic policy, but also from the acceptance by the rest of us of what they may legitimately do in the exercise of this control. Until recently, our acceptance of the notion that central bankers should be committed to price stability has been entirely uncritical; and price stability (not low, but zero inflation) is what the European Central Bank will be required to maintain ...”

“... Jews, wrote a letter to the Independent in which he used as ‘evidence’ a book by the late Edward Atiyah, published in 1955. He quoted Atiyah’s statement that the behaviour of the Arabic press and some Arab leaders was a cause of the Palestinian exodus, but carefully omitted the very next sentence in which the author asserted that the exodus ‘was ...”

“... ghastly, venal sister-in-law, seeing the growing attachment between Elinor and her brother, Edward, observes to Elinor’s mother that Edward must find a wealthy or noble wife. There will be trouble for ‘any young woman who attempted to draw him in’. The implication (Elinor is an unacceptable nobody and should lay ...”

“... thinking outside the New Labour box. Baldwin and Glasman represent the yin and the yang of Project Edward Miliband: the bruiser and the dreamer. So far, though, there is little sign of harmony. One of Baldwin’s first acts was to issue an injunction to the broadcasters (who ignored it) and to Labour spokespersons (who didn’t) that it was time to stop ...”

“... All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,’ the American filmmaker Nunnally Johnson said. ‘It’s such a showy part – half Satan, half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp ...”

“... There, there’ – before he discovers that the word means ‘to vault or arch any thing. Well said, carrie away the bookes againe,’ rather than ‘to fornicate with’. The joke was probably worth the delay, which mimes its readers’ prurient flutter at the sexy-sounding word. Sterne may have picked up a few tips from Harington. The main reason ...”

“... statistical methods as the old philological scholars were of their textual criticisms. Having said which, Bastardy and its Comparative History must be read as it stands: we must wrestle with the book like Jacob with the angel, and a fine reward awaits the victorious. For this is a book of exceptional interest, which leads its reader to pose the problem of ...”

“... of the visual complexity, speed and energy of the city streets. Estes is often associated with Edward Hopper, and the influence is evident in some of his earliest work, but by the mid-1960s, it was waning. In Estes’s Horn and Hardart Automat (1967) day-lit multiple reflecting surfaces bring an apartment block, traffic and signage pouring through the ...”

“... there a sense of unselfconscious connection between painter and subject, though even here Pasmore said that he was cocking a snook at Renoir’s sugary nudes. His career would seem to have owed something to the inferiority complex that afflicted British art and architecture in the 20th century and which lingers still; the preference for any work that shows ...”

“... really is in Texas.) He is a singular artist, at once folk, Conceptual and Pop, an unlikely son of Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp and James Dean. Two retrospectives – a small show of photographs, a large one of drawings – are at the Whitney Museum until 26 September (the drawings will travel to Washington and LA over the next year); a collection of notes ...”