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“... in 2007, R.B. Kitaj describes the origins of his bookish approach to painting. As a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the late 1950s, he attended lectures by the German art historian Edgar Wind, so popular that they were held at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre. The lectures taught him about the intellectualised world of floating images. ‘Wind led me to ...”

“... the universe, Manhattan is its geographical centre. While furtively picking up his mistress Maria Ruskin from Kennedy Airport, McCoy loses his way in the labyrinth of the South Bronx. A barrier of garbage and auto-detritus at an on-ramp forces his $48,000 black Mercedes roadster with its bucket seats to a halt. Such obstructions are – as street-wise New ...”

“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”

“... be described as deeply engaged. A few 18th-century and Victorian gurus – Adam Smith, Bentham, Ruskin – put in brief appearances, and Marx just makes it into a footnote. But of the later sophisticated theorists of things and social behaviour – Durkheim, Gramsci, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss – there’s never a whisper. The author does not ...”

“... bargain box and gave some to friends, including Monckton Milnes, Richard Burton and D.G. Rossetti. Ruskin and Burne-Jones discovered it; Meredith was bowled over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so ...”

“... had passed as a subject ‘out of the orbit of landscape into that of Victorian genre’, as John Gage says in his book about Turner’s picture. The Railway Station shows a train about to leave Paddington; the detail of the architecture is correct – Frith had photographs taken for reference – but it is the partings and greetings you look at ...”

“... to go into now.’ Recent sleuthing has filled in some of the gaps. Nicholas Barker and John Collins’s A Sequel to ‘An Enquiry’ (1983) clarifies the role of Wise’s reluctant partner, Harry Buxton Forman. The forgers’ liaison is fleshed out further in the biographical The Two Forgers, which offers the fullest and most readable narrative to ...”

“... Marxists have discovered, is pride in knowing your place and respecting your superiors. John Osborne’s autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981) is a sustained assault on that attitude in general and his mother in particular. It is no accident that, as Taylor quotes John Vincent saying, Margaret Thatcher was ...”

“... The evacuation of paintings to Wales, just before the outbreak of war. ‘Coventry Cathedral’ by John Piper (1940). ‘Pink and Green Sleepers’ by Henry Moore (1941). ‘Battle of Britain’ by Paul Nash (1941). ‘Saltwood Castle’ by Robin Ironside (c.1955). Sarah Churchill plate design by Duncan Grant (c.1932) from the ‘Famous Ladies’ dinner ...”

“... Pugin got a show at the V&A in 1994, ‘paganised’ (so he would have said) to make it palatable; Ruskin studies are an industry; the Albert Memorial has been restored. But the later phases of the revival after 1870 feel like a backwater. Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, which occupied Sir Giles throughout his career, marks the true climax of the English ...”

“... to yourself,’ in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic ...”

“... virtually cloisonniste patchwork colouring to jagged, insistently awkward linear designs. In 1851 Ruskin started to champion him; in 1853 he fell in with Effie, Ruskin’s bride in a mariage blanc. After Effie became legally his in 1855, following a messy divorce, Millais switched to a distinctly post-Raphaelite tonal ...”

“... too big to do more than quiver a haunch at Lancaster’s jabs. Nor was the situation a new one: Ruskin was unhappy about railways, and the spread of industrial cities could make no aesthete happy. But Lancaster, and friends like John Betjeman and John Piper, were part of the movement ...”

“... looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than the photographs. Sickert’s brown fog and a Whistlerian mist creep into ...”

“... but he didn’t seem to mind so long as he got attention. The disastrous 1877 libel suit with Ruskin, who had ridiculed one of his paintings, bankrupted him – he won a farthing’s damages, but no costs – but it also brought him publicity across two continents as a fighter for modern art, an American who dared to take on the British establishment. A ...”