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“... be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James Campbell McInnes, a man of working-class origins who became the foremost British lieder-singer of his generation. Unfortunately for this marriage of the muses and the classes, Campbell McInnes was also drunken, violent, and ...”

“... the form of overfishing, plays a lively part in Fort’s saga. In 1755, two branches of the Clan Campbell quarrelled over a weir which prevented salmon coming up the other’s river. ‘Sir, I will have no more of your child’s play,’ the outraged Glendarnel Campbell wrote, after repeated attempts by his cousin to ...”

“... for Christ to be tied to, it is without fluting. A rusticated arch in the late Beheading of St John and the manger in a Nativity are unclear. Clouds supporting angels and broad swathes of drapery may make strong patterns against these backgrounds, but even the angels seem to be contained in the same shallow space as the other figures.Photographers and ...”

“... for us to understand – a similar change in sensibility is going on now. The buildings in Colen Campbell’s great 18th-century picture-book of British Classical architecture, Vitruvius Britannicus, are shown in plan, elevation or one-point perspective. But when Soane, in the first decades of the 19th century, makes a presentation drawing he is likely to ...”

“... is up to his successor to keep on with the tablets.’ That successor, in October 1993, was still John Smith; so it was a pre-Blair perspective that led me to conclude: ‘If a “labour party” did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent it. But a social democratic party known as the Labour Party, with an unstitched leadership, is more necessary than ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad ...”

“... In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite infancy, like Isabella and Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop; anecdotal ones, like My First Sermon (a child portrait in the Bubbles line); landscapes (Chill October); pictures with stories (The Proscribed Royalist) and pictures from stories (Mariana ...”

“... Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there are details of studio practice. The stages whereby a malleable clay face or figure metamorphosed into marble ...”

“... house-guest for most of his life, stands on the pre-professional side of the divide: Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, on the post-professional side. The careers Dorothy Stroud and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had ...”

“... hell fire. Even descriptions of nature in America are macabre. What he remembers of a trip with John Dos Passos are the corpses of tortoises squashed on the road, and ‘the asparagus-like stench’ of a run-over skunk. On a holiday at Garnet Lake near New York the food goes mysteriously bad, bloated horseflies and red ants share the bedroom, and the ...”

“... or stone. Some see in this detail the physical expression of a kind of warts-and-all truthfulness. John Berger says in his introduction: ‘When I first looked at these photographs I dismissed them as derivative ... something stronger drew me back ... I like to think it was a recalcitrant response to their truthfulness.’ The truth he sees is essentially ...”

“... adventures within it seem both realistic and safe. No possible turn of a Ransome story would allow John, Roger, Susan and Titty to be embarrassed by their mother’s breasts showing through a tight sweat shirt. Many heroes are a cut above Adrian in talent. K.M. Peyton’s Pennington is a rough diamond and gets into trouble with the police, but he is also a ...”

“... John Minton’s face is familiar – if not from the self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, then from the likeness he commissioned from Lucian Freud and bequeathed to the Royal College of Art. It is very long, large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a receding chin and dark tousled hair. Photographs suggest that the self-portrait is a better physical likeness; the truth about his emotional state seems to lie with Lucian Freud ...”

“... only really switched on the power in the 1950s. Novelists such as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey and V.S. Naipaul were among the first voices from the outposts of Empire to talk back. Not for them ‘clapping his hands and stamping his feet’ in order to communicate, like Conrad’s fireman (‘and he had filed ...”

“... part-Spanish friend is often ‘black’ if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, ...”