“... of illuminated manuscripts, books of hours marking the rotation of the days and years, and stained glass in which saints hover in cerulean bliss, varied only with an occasional rainbow, a piece of virtuoso craftsmanship, marking the end of the Flood. But this is all still background. Bright blue means day, dark blue night. Nobody perhaps needed more at a time ...”

“... for example, that Vermeer’s girl’s huge pearl earrings are probably fakes, ‘thin spheres of glass’ filled with a preparation made from ‘the silvery scales of a river fish’ – which rather undermines Chevalier’s climactic scene, in which they are sold to a man who bites them to test their authenticity. Inevitably, Bailey often has to take ...”

“... she had to’. By this point, if not before, it’s clear that Ezra bears a strong resemblance to Philip Roth. The week Asymmetry was published, Halliday, in a very Roth-like two-step, gave an interview to the New York Times in which she revealed that she had met and dated Roth when she was an assistant at the Wylie Agency in her twenties and defended herself ...”

“... with almost comic difficulty, discusses with herself the strangeness of such words as ‘looking-glass’, not a glass that looks any more than a dressing-gown dresses. To stand requires the help of both arms, so eliminating gesture. Walking is painful: ‘The legs now burn permanently, hot charcoal in the feet creeping up ...”

“... fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish ...”

“... Philip Larkin gave the name High Windows to what proved to be his last collection of verse (published in 1974, 11 years before he died). The phrase had been used as the title of one of the poems included, and also occurs at the poem’s end: the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless ...”

“... a giggle, a fag, a gin and tonic (no more than a couple) and, I am sorry to record, an occasional glass of Empire wine, Keystone or Big Tree, for the “iron” in it. But she was more than that. It was that gentle creature who, when I rendered my first wife pregnant before our marriage, told my father not to be such a fool with his threats of excommunication ...”

“... responsible for the final proof-reading should be sent back in time and made to march on Moscow. Philip Longworth’s elegant account of Alexis Romanov, Tsar of Russia from 1645 to 1676, claims to be ‘the first full biography ... in any language for 150 years’. This is misleading as another study of the same monarch was published four years ...”

“... As the years ticked by England became more and more isolated diplomatically. A cold war with Philip II of Spain had turned by the 1580s into military intervention in the Low Countries and France, and war at sea. With her rival claim to the Tudor throne, Mary Queen of Scots made Elizabeth’s refusal either to marry or to name a successor the most ...”

“... period – wore the same clothes is to deny the realities of a society structured around class.’ Philip Wright proposes that special reception areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the staff will ...”

“... fairytale trappings still hinder its restoration to the pre-modern intellectual mainstream. In Philip Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford (2003), Sebastian Makepeace slaves away in ‘a hot, close, sulphurous room lit only by the flames of a great iron furnace in one corner. Benches along each wall were laden with glass beakers ...”

“... the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls them, ‘a conspiracy of nobodies’. It is a bittersweet story, and one that goes far to explain why most modern architecture is so awful. Like Sydney, the Opera House was a British idea. Sir Eugene Goossens, the violinist and ...”

“... The only stirrings of the revolution about to overtake British art schools were in the stained glass department, overseen by a dynamic young teacher, Charles Carey. Boty’s switch of disciplines was, Kristal suggests, ‘the most important choice of her creative life’. Carey was an inspiring teacher and stained ...”

“... Union, his fourth adult novel, he plays with two genres: the counterfactual, derived from Philip K. Dick; and the noir thriller, derived from Chandler and Hammett. The counterfactual is all in the background. The thriller is all in the foreground. The thematic link between the two is the endlessly precarious nature of Jewishness. Two years ...”

“... What the puritan sees in Bosch’s pictures is the horror of sin. The pious and bloodthirsty Philip II of Spain, a great lover of Bosch, discovered an image of the rift in himself between the lust that tormented him beneath his hair shirt and the ferocious chastisement of Eros that he practised by burning a good many of his subjects at the stake. As for ...”