“... 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, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the ...”

“... poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to have his voice in election of burgesses.’ It was there that Ireton quarrelled with the Levellers, in terms close to those of ...”

“... dealers, most notably Joseph Duveen, who ensured that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by Duveen himself): the conservative decorator and the conservative ...”

“... of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end ...”

“... look, but more frequently with a smile. ‘The great business of his life,’ he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘was to escape from himself; this disposition he considered as the disease of his mind, which nothing cured but company.’ He ‘loved late hours extremely, or more properly hated early ones. Nothing was more terrifying to him than the idea of ...”

“... of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should ...”

“... music developed a past much later than the visual arts or literature. The oppression felt in John Henry Fuseli’s drawing ‘The artist moved by the grandeur of ancient ruins’ (1778-80), in which he pictures himself with his head in his hands next to the giant foot of the statue of Constantine, is simply absent from contemporary musical culture. While ...”

“... father-son relationship made possible by impending death. It won an Academy Award. Debbie Reynolds was in a 1964 film version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, based loosely on the life of one of the most famous of the first-class survivors, which was nominated for six Oscars. With the discovery of the wreck in 1985, some twenty kilometres from where the ...”

“... Eventually a younger generation of African-American scholars, prominent among them Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr, came round and paid respects to The Confessions of Nat Turner, and some even designated Styron the inadvertent father of the postmodern slave narrative, but by then he may have been so bruised by the initial beatdown that it wasn’t much ...”