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“... artists. Turner and Constable would have known even the landscapes of their great predecessor Richard Wilson mainly through some wonderful prints by Woollett and others, and at the Academy no fewer than 12 of these are exhibited together, classical landscapes animated by mythological figures, and opposite them some of the great Welsh views including ...”

“... around in a very characteristic way, and blurted out his answer in a fast, high-pitched voice. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I think I see exactly what you mean, and it’s fascinating, but really I don’t see why "suburban". Aren’t you trying to be too – specific? I don’t see why suburban has anything to do with it. I really don’t think it has.’ At ...”

“... and for their delicate, erudite beauty. Each hedgehog has around six thousand hollow spines, nut-brown at the base, rising to a strip of black and changing at the very tip to purest white. When threatened, they roll into an impenetrable ball, which deters almost all animals with the exception of badgers, and us: Pliny wrote that you could unroll them by ...”

“... moulded bricks of the kind Palladio’s columns were built with. But it is in the many drawings in brown ink that you can see how hard Palladio worked at playing the game of architecture and determining its rules. Most of them are now in the RIBA library: they were brought to England by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s and then passed through various hands, in ...”

“... vengefulness, the compulsive penis envy, and the desire to be whipped, of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types ...”

“... true celebrity ‘delivers’. He or she keeps weaving and moving in an effort not to disappoint. Richard Nixon was such a one. Every time a new segment of Watergate tape was released, revealing his Jew-baiting or thuggery or corruption, he would publish a new book on grand strategy or at least fly to Beijing. What a trouper! Such a pro! Say what you like ...”

“... the first task of an impartial biographer of Wyclif was the removal of ‘several layers of rich brown Protestant varnish’. For him, Wyclif’s uncompromising predestinarianism was ‘a grisly creed’. To read Wyclif was ‘not fun’. And he wrote of Wyclif’s ‘catastrophic incompetence as a practical reformer . . . Nothing is to be gained by ...”

“... In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand ...”

“... the horizon stands the sacred Shiprock, with the Chuska Mountains behind. The vegetation is brown; roads, the edges of ponds and the railway from the mine to the power station are scored into the landscape, razor sharp. The Morgan Lake seen in New Mexico tourist brochures and on websites is a tempting cobalt blue, offering windsurfing, boating and ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art. Yet, as we might expect of this ‘father of ...”

“... that Shakespeare was trapped into marriage with Anne Hathaway and then cuckolded by his brother Richard. Hence the queen in Hamlet, adulterous with her brother-in-law, while Shakespeare plays the ghost; and hence Richard III, where sly Dick seduces Lady Anne. Perhaps the Joycean influence became unhelpful ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... that they will never deflower me!’ He was indeed devoured, for the very reason he feared. As Richard Hooker put it, half a century later, in a cooler ecclesiastical climate: ‘Hitherto they which condemn utterly the name [Supreme Head of the Church] so applied, do it because they mislike that any such power should be given unto civil governors. The ...”

“... in 1858 may appear not only presumptuous but also inappropriate to a commemoration of Radcliffe-Brown, whose lifelong concern was with structure and function rather than with evolution, and whose vision of ‘a natural science of society’ was, it has often been said, more taxonomic than analytical.* But the appearance is, I think, superficial, for two ...”