“... the piano’s one-step-forward, one-step-back into a better beat. The doubt and trepidation that mark the borders of the song aren’t lessened, but the territory within is singing with energy; the uncertainty that a moment before said fear now says who cares. The rhythm becomes a chase after pleasure; the chase is caught and let loose for the pleasure of ...”

“... does not seem to permit a study of the Florentine palace of the Renaissance along the lines of Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House. However, Goldthwaite has put his finger on an important problem, all the more important because the example of the Florentines was followed all over Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. In Genoa, for ...”

“... this novel without saying Venice, and yet the name is never said. The dust-jacket may give us a Turner water-colour of Venice’s waters, but the blurb says not one word about the novel, and the novel never says the word ‘Venice’. The scene is unmistakable, and is just the setting within which to make the mistake of your life. McEwan has said that ...”

“... beautifully produced, but falls short of the scholarship of works in this area by F.M.L. Thompson, Mark Girouard and Brent Elliott, to which it owes a great deal. The text represents an extensive trawl of material, which is presented in the form of a verbal scrapbook covering a range of topics, under headings such as ...”

“... to marry the adroit Augustine Birrell, later Secretary of State for Ireland and an indefatigable turner-out of occasional light essays –‘Birrelling’, it came to be called. Emily, as usual, loved and welcomed, but Alfred was deeply suspicious. ‘Why do you want to force an entry into my family?’ he asked his prospective son-in-law, saying aloud what ...”

“... before by Isaac Newton. Did either have an effect on painting? It’s true that the elderly Turner read Goethe with critical sympathy, and Gage also shows that Newton’s spectrum features here and there in 18th-century iconography. But these major theorists of colour sidled their way into the studio by the back route, if at all. There is hardly any ...”

“... is deserted. In a splendid street-facing room there is an art manifestation, an exhibition by Mark Reeves, tagged Glamour, which consists of groups of monochrome prints, photographs of photographs. In the Zone there are essentially two types of pitch: small photographs (such as these) or very large photographs, such as those by Marc Atkins in the ...”

“... hotel’ with ‘the most exclusive guest list’ and ‘an unforgettable performance from Mark Knopfler’. No wonder those refugee ladies are grinning from ear to ear. Also on International Women’s Day, Power wrote in the Guardian about ‘Rage of the Girl Rioters’, the title of a Daily Mail piece about the anti-tuition-fees day of action last ...”

“... the art he deployed in at least twelve plays with such magnificent success. The arch-rationalist Mark Twain held Sir Walter Scott to blame for the disabling romanticism of the American South: Tennessee Williams, brought up on the Waverley novels, was a joyful victim of the disease. ‘I write out of love for the South … I think the war between romanticism ...”

“... after Marthe’s death, he told the woman to pretend he wasn’t there. It might be nearer the mark to think he was pretending that she wasn’t there, which isn’t to say that Bonnard didn’t look – he spent a lot of time just looking. The drawings he painted from are sometimes sketchy and furious, sometimes fussy, but never terribly precise, far from ...”

“... the building and layout of the houses in which people lived. This gap was filled by Thomas Hudson Turner, who worked on household accounts and planned a three-volume work on medieval domestic architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early ...”

“... and alarmed – the team at Givenchy in Paris when he arrived there, and his tailoring skills mark the wonderfully elegant suits and outfits on show in the first rooms of the exhibition. After Savile Row, he went to work for theatrical costumiers, and continued to take off into different eras and places, reprising Jacobite jabots, tartans and sashes (in ...”

“... short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were ...”

“... over.) Nor was the work on cars just a matter of finish. In the making of a painting each brush mark changes the situation, the decision about what to do next is affected by the decision just made. Irwin took a New York critic to see a boy working on a car: ‘the kid was making decisions abut the frame, whether or not he was going to cad-plate certain ...”

“... shows of Georgian London included transparencies painted on canvas and backlit with oil lamps to mark notable public occasions. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 saw a display outside the French ambassador’s residence where the figures of France and England stood united between the words ‘Peace’ and ‘Concord’. Unfortunately, some sailors in the crowd ...”