“... given that most portraits were of the rich and powerful, and flattery was one of the major currencies of social intercourse. Today we are inclined to admire portraits for their supposed honesty and insight, but we are more indulgent with paintings from the past. No one would suppose that portraits by Van Dyck or Reynolds are other than ...”

“... It is undeniable that parts of the panel are superbly painted but if Verrocchio was involved in a major way that would make him responsible for the composition. Yet one of the angels seems about to tumble out of the picture and the other (holding a lily as if he was Gabriel in the Annunciation) is uncomfortably situated in space. He also collides awkwardly ...”

“... structure which bellowed ‘Design!’ and was met with incomprehension. The Beaubourg, the first major building obviously in thrall to Archigram, was equally unfavourably received. The reaction of the members of Archigram and their collaborator Cedric Price is shown in a film from 1980 in which they turn up in a minibus, apparently gobsmacked ...”

“... counter to the slow march of figures, taking the form of silent communication between Christ and John, their contact barred by a stern Roman officer, as the Virgin Mary faints. Some of the later narratives in the nave (scenes from the New Testament twinned with the Old) achieve a similar intensity, reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often ...”

“... of old ones. He tends to use ‘genre’ in an indefinite, all-inclusive way; ‘kind’ for the major traditional divisions of the literary spectrum (tragedy, epic etc.); and ‘sub-genre’ for smaller ad hoc divisions. His one important innovation is the meaning he gives to ‘mode’. The names for kinds are nouns – epic, comedy, satire. But they also ...”

“... and in Scottish history will need to read it and will learn a great deal. There are, however, some major problems. For many, the biggest difficulty will be Fry’s tone and approach. He is an unapologetic Tory, currently a rare breed in Scotland, and sometimes appears eager to anticipate criticism on this score by richly deserving it. His book focuses almost ...”

“... making speeches, supporting dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam against Governor-General Sir John Kerr (whom he describes as ‘a rorty farting old Falstaff’), declaring himself a Republican, and writing a play with strong social over-tones. But when the Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1973 he refused to go to Stockholm to receive it, and the ...”

“... as ‘The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture’ rather than as Civilisation and Its Discontents. His major dissatisfaction with the standard translation of the title is that it makes it easy to believe that civilisation and discontent are two separate phenomena, instead of, as Freud in fact believed, that Unbehagen (‘uneasiness’) is the price we must pay for ...”

“... the intrigues of his enemies did the family emigrate to Boston. There, Gibran grew up to become a major artistic and political figure. In Paris he knew Debussy, while Rodin went so far as to acclaim him as ‘the Blake of the 20th century’. As it happened, Gibran could remember not only his previous reincarnation as William Blake, but also a subsequent ...”

“... Since Plato, the major European philosophers, consistent upon almost nothing else, have been united in a sustained denunciation of rhetoric. Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric is an attempt, copious, complex, armed at all points with telling examples, to meet and turn back this onslaught, which seems so confidently sure of its own rightness ...”

“... a fortnight before, in August 1900, had exacerbated his decline, but eating bananas had been the major cause of death. A lawyer called Albert T. Patrick took charge of the funeral arrangements. On the day after Rice’s death, Patrick tried to have four cheques certified. The cheques, all made out to himself, totalled $250,000, and appeared to have been ...”

“... campaign filled with venomous slogans. The differences in political programme between the two major parties did not appear to be that great because the programmes themselves were vague in the extreme. The contest was between images. The Socialists recruited avant-garde artists, progressive rock stars and intellectuals (much more valued in Latin than in ...”

“... successive British Governments were well aware of this, as were the Unionists. In 1993, however, John Hume’s talks with Gerry Adams reached the point where an unconditional cessation of IRA violence became a real possibility and the Major Government was persuaded by Dublin to open the way for such a development by ...”

“... But she and her colleagues continue to search for distinguishing marks of lateness in the work of major artists in their last years, to ask whether they give evidence of failing powers, such as might in the ordinary course of things be expected: senescence; illness; the decay of the senses; the certainty that death, always feared at a distance but now in the ...”

“... and his wife Mary returned from a head-hunting trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on ...”