“... with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a ...”

“... discomfort or guilt about worldly rewards? This, the theme of Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of Riches, is not inconsistent with the view that moral warnings against worldly pleasures lurk beneath the surfaces of the paintings. Dutch art in this account is an art of proscribing, not an art of describing. Combined with the assault on portrayal is another ...”

“... whole new ball game. With what mortifying surfeit do we find ourselves faced? An embarrassment of riches. The consequence is that we now know almost everything there is to know about Flann O’Brien; and out of this knowledge a story has emerged, a received narrative, which makes a more upsetting kind of sense than anything he ever wrote in his books. Our ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”

“... who, riding the crest of American industrial power, sets herself to absorb (and to buy) the riches of Europe:Where she excels is her capacity to plunge into experience without paying the usual Jamesian penalty for such daring – the penalty being either the loss of one’s moral balance or the recoil into a state of aggrieved innocence. She responds ...”

“... social, political or economic resource. It can be fought over and squandered. It can create great riches, for the companies and shareholders who monopolise our water supply today. In England, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished state-owned regional water authorities in 1989, and water was privatised. Eleven of England’s 18 water utilities are at ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... declined. After Portugal expelled its Jewish community, it was rewarded by the discovery of vast riches: a sea route to India and access to the spice trade. But hadn’t Portugal’s refugee Jews been taken in by the Ottoman Empire, and hadn’t it gone on to conquer Syria and Egypt? In the end, questions of divine punishment and favour proved less ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... supremo, Magnus Linklater, as well as by the two members of the Observer’s investigative unit, David Leigh and Paul Lashmar. I added my voice to theirs, urging vigilance and caution. To no avail, however – and perhaps understandably. On Saturday, 11 January 1986, Donald Trelford, the editor of the Observer, had spent a lot of time closeted in the ...”

“... one of art history’s most heavily worked veins, yet approached from these angles it still yields riches. What fabulous chimeras they chased after, back then. In the wake of Baudelaire dreaming up his ‘correspondences’ of colour and sound, artists began to cherish the notion that every kind of sensory input might converge, so as to pitch participants onto ...”

“... I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair – and my weapon is only the slingshot of David. Martí was the founder of the Cuban nation, the framer of Cuban identity if anyone was, and this doesn’t sound like identification with the United States. Goliath stepped in before David could level the ...”

“... unforgettably illustrated the gradations of misery. Poverty is very gently paraphrased by want of riches. In that sense almost every man may in his own opinion be poor. But there is another poverty which is want of competence, of all that can soften the miseries of life, of all that can diversify attention, or delight imagination. There is yet another poverty ...”

“... without reason. As a rule, the wealthier the patron, the more lavish the decoration. In the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, peasants wear ultramarine to do fieldwork. Many manuscripts are celebrated for their riot of detail. But Gertsman tracks the opposite of that plenitude: the deliberate void that invites the viewer to fill an absence. Such a lacuna ...”