“... William Chinnery is, by comparison, a little bland. Vigée Le Brun was at her best with romantic young girls and attractive men. The sublime was beyond her register: it is hard to take her picture of Madame de Staël strumming her lyre seriously, and when, late in life, she undertook a painting of Marie Antoinette in prison, the task proved so painful she ...”

“... pilot (his father was a pioneer in aviation and a business partner of Amelia Earhart, who doted on young Gore), his serio-comic encounters with Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Orson Welles, and his holidays in the sinister sunlight of Hollywood as a hired hand (there’s still controversy about how much homoeroticism he snuck into the screenplay of ...”

“... ever played the games I wrote was me. My older sister wasn’t interested; my other sister was too young; and when friends came round we were more likely to spend the time out on our bikes or climbing trees or playing football. Writing computer games, like any kind of writing, or even like reading, was a solitary activity. If we did huddle round the ...”

“... of childhood giving way to artifice and obligation. The earliest humans were no different from a young Jean-Jacques in Geneva. How’s that for narcissism?Rousseau and his contemporaries read the travel journals of French missionaries to the Americas in search of a humanity relatively untouched by civilisation. Indigenous populations like the ‘Caribs of ...”

“... When in his late teens and early twenties he began his career in London, people noted how ‘young and schoolboyish’ he was. His diaries from that time record enthusiasms for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing a string quartet about his ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... of a solution, by fleshing out the original makers of the myth – Joe and Rose Kennedy. David Nasaw’s The Patriarch is a comprehensive account of Joseph Kennedy’s ascent from lace-curtain respectability to extraordinary wealth and political influence, followed by exile to the margins and vicarious achievement through his sons. Nasaw shows that ...”

“... this time stole the surname of a classmate – formed a two-tone band called the Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. Michael was lead vocalist but hadn’t yet found the right style: his attempts at a Jamaican accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... At the Paris Salon​ of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving moral content; in the background, two women are sketching from a ringleted, clothed female model, concentrating on getting the folds of the drapery right ...”

“... which, Tony Judt lamented in Ill Fares the Land, ‘misled a generation of young activists into believing that, conventional avenues of change being hopelessly clogged, they should forsake political organisation for single-issue, non-governmental groups unsullied by compromise’.Moyn was one of these activists, but has since fruitfully ...”

“... much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s ...”

“... most origin stories, this one is too telling to be entirely true; it has a frisson, as the critic David Sylvester put it, ‘at once Oedipal and necrophilic’. Although Magritte wasn’t present at the scene, he alludes to it in a few paintings. In The Musings of the Solitary Walker (1926), a man in a bowler hat, a recurrent avatar of the artist, stands by a ...”

“... who, in the throes of a break with the émigré Surrealists, was planning a juried show for young artists. Mondrian was one of the jurors. The story of Mondrian’s Nod is that Guggenheim had sorted through the entries herself, segregating the duds, among them Pollock’s Stenographic Figure. On the day of the jury Mondrian showed up before the others ...”

“... a triple-decker steak sandwich washed down with bourbon’. Lunch, ‘inhaled’ (this is David Thomson’s word) while rehearsing The Shoemaker’s Holiday, soon to be Welles’s second hit for the Mercury Players, was comparably stupefying. Callow depicts Welles perched at a table in the stalls, ‘roaring out instructions and mock abuse as he ...”