“... his recent book Sensations, subtitled ‘The Story of British Art from Hogarth to Banksy’, Jonathan Jones reinterprets major artistic careers from the early 18th century until Turner’s death in 1851, at which point a daunting briar patch thwarts his progress.* As Jones sees it, art was ‘suffocated’ by the ‘tangle of Evangelical ...”

“... to repair efforts that change the familiar appearance of a painting. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Jones compared the restored Nativity with the ‘Monkey Christ’, the botched restoration of a fresco by Elías García Martínez which has become the main tourist attraction in the Spanish town of Borja. Jones calls the newly glazed and shaded faces of ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... tenth of that owned by the local duke, a Tory, but they intended to be his political equals. They rose financially and socially through service to the army and the crown, at home and abroad. One Grey became private secretary to Prince Albert and then to Queen Victoria. Charles Grey’s father – the first Earl Grey – was a tough, blunt soldier who did well ...”

“... places.) It is built round illustrations of details, nearly all from paintings in the Prado. Here Jonathan Brown, his biographer, reduces the life to Vasari-scale and Carmen Garrido, an expert on technique and materials, explains the nature of single works. Velázquez is a wonderful subject for this sort of scrutiny. The paintings are remarkably uncompromised ...”

“... disposition, Ellis didn’t court establishment acceptance and audience affection, showers of rose petals. His persona, his literary approach, his interviews, carried a built-in take-it-or-leave-it shrug. This attitude outfitted him with a protective padding that would come in handy later during the mud-stomping rugby scrums he’d find himself at the ...”

“... hungrily at the words like a dog at pieces of raw meat’. Eventually he rose to his feet and launched into a long, ranting monologue, all the while thwacking his boot with the riding whip. Franckenstein’s servants rushed in, thinking that their employer was being attacked. After Hitler had said his piece and left, there was a long ...”

“... of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times – ‘send all his hopeless droopers to the gym’ – he is merely ‘ridiculous’. Tim Hilton made better reading in 1970, when he observed in his ...”

“... building up an accurate picture of how these machines worked, as they discard the novelists’ rose-tinted spectacles, investigate downstairs as much as upstairs, and increasingly reveal the country house for what it was – the embodiment and expression of a particular economic, social and political order. The growing fashion for social and women’s ...”

“... is commissioned to write an article for a Sydney editor. He tells her his paper’s circulation rose when he ran a supplement on male homosexuality: ‘This is the second gay capital of the world after San Francisco... It started as a prison, maybe they retained the habit.’ Lillian likes the pock marks on his bluish jowls, and tries to ‘gain the erotic ...”

“... have been prevented if the guards had washed their hands. Mortality rates at the maternity clinics rose again after the handwashing regime was abandoned. Only some years later, in Germany, did it become common practice for doctors to wash their hands (they used chlorine).In her introduction to Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start – and Why They Don’t Go ...”

“... the curiosity of mass journals like Newsweek. Amidst this swirl of publicity and controversy, Jonathan Culler has managed to remain calm long enough to write a reasoned defence of deconstruction, one from which both scholars and general readers will be able to learn a good deal. Culler is fairly termed an apologist for the post-structuralist critical ...”

“... tai and yu (‘essence’ and ‘attribute’) and the arrangement of loaded words (‘pine’, ‘rose’, ‘late cherry blossom’), renga poets such as Basho developed skills inseparable from compilation. What held between poems became intrinsic. The renga recently written by Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson are thus suggestive. They explore ...”

“... in the election year 1953, when it counted 2,134,285 registered members. The number of voters rose steadily from 4,358,243 to nearly eight million by 1963. Yet the growth, the sense of inevitable onward development, could not conceal a basic dilemma. On his return to Italy in March 1944, Togliatti chose the path of co-operation with the status quo – in ...”

“... by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald ‘introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the Partisan Review and founder of his own journal Politics: she stared at him and said, “Have you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind.” ’ ‘American-style’ may be a hint that in ...”