“... of that too: ‘Dario and I opened at the Persian Room of the Plaza on 10 June 1935. The next day, John McClain telephoned ... Pepi had just killed herself by jumping out of a window of the psychiatric section of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Looking in the mirror as I checked my hair, make-up and costume for the dinner show, I thought, her ...”

“... identified as causes of disease. Bad smells and visible grime were easier to point to. Long after John Snow’s demonstration that something waterborne would explain the distribution of cholera cases in the area served by the Broad Street pump (his plan of the area, mapping mortality, is on display) the theory that it was a miasma – infected air – that ...”

“... so are disposable nappies.The English were early movers in the campaign to free the bound baby – John Locke spoke out against swaddling in Some Thoughts Concerning Education – but in France, despite Rousseau, it had a longer history. As babies make no comment, the relative comfort of papoose mode and free-kicking mode are hard to judge, but decisions about ...”

“... might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de ...”

“... are note-like sketches – the one of hanged men, for example, or the drawings of the entourage of John VIII Palaeologus, the Byzantine Emperor, made when he was attending the Council of Ferrara in 1438 – but it is the worked-up studies which best meet Facio’s description: of a horse harness drawn as though to instruct a farrier, and the different ...”

“... money from, pictures of this sort: for Sir George Beaumont The Blind Fiddler; for the financier John Julius Angerstein (who paid 800 guineas) The Village Holiday; for the Prince Regent Blind Man’s Buff (finished 1813). Wilkie became an associate and then a member of the Royal Academy while very young; he was knighted and made a painter to the King. He was ...”

“... Did all Van Dyck’s male sitters really have the long-fingered, blue-veined hands that Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard share with the Abbé Scaglia and so many others? Were the hands of Rembrandt’s sitters really all solid and paw-like? Those of Jacob Trip, his wife, Margaretha de Geer, and Hendrickje Stoffels seem to be generated by the ...”

“... gardening has been the fashion.There have been times, however, when London’s green tide was out. John Evelyn’s intentions in writing Sylva (‘A discourse of forest and the propagation of timber in his majesties dominions’), published in 1664, were practical. The book answered a request from the Commissioners of the Navy to the Royal Society for advice ...”

“... that the extra information in the painted images, even to a degree in the photographed ones like John Coplans’s black and white prints, can bear being looked at for longer. There are colours the projector cannot match, there is information about how the painter used his hands, how he responded to the task of showing what an eye or a foot looks like, how he ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her ...”

“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... joke, a book to go with the pretty china on the dresser. So one is almost too grateful to turn to John Yeoman’s and Quentin Blake’s The Wild Washerwomen, and should say at once that the drawings show no astounding virtuosity in the re-creation of textures, that the words have no overtones of poetry, that it aims only to tell a funny story with a twist in ...”

“... and painters of modern life that manifested itself most memorably in 19th-century Paris. So are John Sloan’s etchings of New York tenements and city crowds (he, too, had worked for newspapers) and George Bellows’s lithographs of a prize fight, a psychiatric ward and couples in the park. In London and Paris, the illustrations that painters admired ...”

“... has a long tradition in Britain. Thomas Grant, in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in 1957 is ‘generally regarded as the finest single volume account ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson which are turned to when photography is used as propaganda and shows public faces (John F. Kennedy, for example, or Anwar Sadat) in private places looking kind and nice. Avedon’s West pictures, with only one or two exceptions, show a person or a couple standing square on to the camera: they are full face, and sometimes show the hands, never ...”