“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... intercut scenes. Misty meadows and fruit ripening in the conservatory are juxtaposed with broken glass and torn fabric. Asya’s first exile is to France; she finds she is pregnant and bears Sergei’s child. She is loved by a poet and a doctor, both Russian, both involved with émigré plots and factions. Then Sergei turns up on her doorstep ...”

“... of herself’. Or, musing on her marriage to Charles and the new obsession with her stepson Philip: ‘She wished passionately that she could be the author of her own life, go back fifteen years and cross out Charles. No, not cross him out; she was very fond of Charles; just marry his son instead of him.’ Sylvie has a ‘marvellously simple’ cure ...”

“... Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking metal, as in Ovid:Where are the ...”

“... In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... Stained-glass​ windowpanes salvaged from Gorhambury, Francis Bacon’s 17th-century Hertfordshire residence, feature a cornucopia of flora and fauna, including tobacco plants, parrots and Indigenous men from North America, alongside mythical reclining river gods – all in vividly translucent colours. Visiting Louis XIII’s château at St-Germain-en-Laye in 1625, Peter Heylyn, one of Bacon’s contemporaries, admitted that he would have been more impressed by the decorative stained glass had he not previously seen Bacon’s installation at Gorhambury, where ‘all the Fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are so naturally and lively dissembled’ that it had seemed as ‘if art went beyond itself ...”

“... to catch a bedbug: in the middle of the first night, I found two in the bedding, stuck them in a glass and presented them at reception, in hope of a refund, but I was dispatched to another room instead. I stripped the new bed down, doused the sheets and blankets with vodka, remade it, and lay on the covers like an olive in a very damp Martini, trying to ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... often made the front page of the New York Times. In 1911, he spent $475,000 on a portrait of Philip IV by Velázquez. But, as Frick noted to a fellow industrialist in 1895, the year he began collecting in earnest, there was ‘more real pleasure’ to be derived from buying works of art than from anything else outside of business: ‘It seems to me ...”

“... railway age. The composition and fixing of dyes, the technical complexities of encaustic, stained glass and lustreware, were elusive to an extent that was at first a surprise, then a challenge to 19th-century revivalists. De Morgan had inherited from his parents a methodical, scientific turn of mind which he now found a means of expressing in art. He gave up ...”

“... be, Lawrence none the less succeeded, as we know, in exciting many of his readers. One of them was Philip Larkin, who always liked and admired Lawrence, considering him a criterion for the literary ‘non-bogus’. But Lawrence would not at all have cared for Larkin’s own use of the pornographic, in its higher or its lower manifestations. For Larkin, like ...”