“... scene after another, exhibiting that scepticism towards conventional representation that Jenny Turner has suggested is a special feature of contemporary West of Scotland writing. The irony is that as Tom’s escapades become progressively entangled, so he falls victim to his own residual belief in plots and schemes. Death and destruction seem to dog his ...”

“... the African-American Left assailed William Styron’s bestselling novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, as racist and perverted, Genovese carried on a spirited defence of the white author from Virginia and his right to make artistic excursions into history. His next book, The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), moved him further along the right-veering ...”

“... Constable, Cotman or Cézanne – has produced better pictures than the landscape of travel. Even Turner was better, or at least more original, in England than abroad. And the subjects of still-life, the objects used or eaten every day – they, too, are humble. The very limitations of still-life allow a special kind of completeness. In Chardin’s case you ...”

“... followed Roger North’s over-eager proto-professionals began to assume that their genius should mark the smallest details of the work they undertook and the erosion of the independence of the worker in stone, plaster, brick or wood accelerated. The drawing-men took over from the making-men. Conception and execution became separate provinces. Thinking, not ...”

“... the Ukrainian Jewish factory manager Mendel Beilis on a charge of ritual murder, was a highwater mark in American anti-semitism. Shortly after the Georgia jury convicted Frank, a jury of Ukrainian peasants acquitted Beilis. Yet during the decades when tens of thousands of innocent African Americans were imprisoned or murdered in the South, it was Ukrainian ...”

“... by armed cavalry resulting in 15 deaths and over 600 injuries.’ A stone memorial designed by the Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller has been commissioned as part of an extensive programme of lottery-funded commemorations to mark next year’s bicentenary. Questions remain about the build-up to 16 August and who was at fault ...”

“... troubled. At the time of the dinner, Mary Shelley had written Frankenstein: its publication would mark the moment in fiction when the myth of man-created life passed for the first time from the artist’s studio to the laboratory, never to return. ‘There is a March of Science,’ Lamb wrote, ‘but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?’ Yet ...”

“... to ask Mr MacColl if Mr Steer is a good painter?’ (MacColl was on the staff of the Tate.) The Turner Prize is just one piece of evidence that Sickert had a shrewd sense of where things might be heading. There are still adequate, in some cases excellent, livings being earned from room pictures, but big reputations are made by way of exhibitions and the ...”

“... a degree unmatched even by the industrial East. Stanford’s fellow tycoons in these projects were Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington – ‘and their corruption was as big as their profit,’ Solnit says. These ‘Big Four’, all former Sacramento storekeepers who had sold goods to Gold Rush miners, had come to monopolise political and ...”

“... author’s and genre’s normal parameters of plausibility, and the redemptive hermeneutics which mark the talismanic village find life in the very centre of its hermetically-damned shadow. Other and later writers than Sayers, equally cornered by the extreme conservatism of Golden Age detection, have tried their hands at these villages – Allingham’s ...”

“... hopeless endeavour. No one would buy it, hardly anyone would admire it: the painting would merely mark another stage in his descent into neglect and debt. On 22 June, in front of his vast unfinished canvas in the sweltering studio, he shot himself and then cut his throat. At the inquest the coroner’s summing-up dwelt chiefly on Sir Robert Peel’s ...”

“... there are Dürer etchings and Bauhaus prints; there’s a 17th-century plague mask and billion-mark banknotes from the hyperinflation of 1923. The exhibition makes German history come alive. When I visited it I came across MacGregor showing round a delegation from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Federal Parliament (a high proportion of the ...”

“... with little flags for each of the four contesting parties – as if the council had been told to mark the occasion. Labour’s ‘campaign headquarters’ in the Port and in Greenock were empty behind locked doors, with not even a sticker to identify them. Up the hill in Boglestone, the Orange Lodge looked just as it used to when I was a candidate: a low ...”

“... rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner. Ned did well enough at school to be allowed to study classics, and his classmates became his first real friends. He was attracted to religious ceremony, and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John ...”

“... in India intended for the same room in Ferrara, and to The Death of Actaeon being unfinished (like Turner, Titian was in the habit of making the first moves in a painting and then keeping it by him and working it up years later). But the comparison, colour apart, would still hold if the Boston Rape of Europa, which, like The Death of Actaeon, is mentioned in a ...”