“... It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says. Or his good luck. At the end, he and his friend walk through a section of Kyoto wrecked by an out-of-control train – there was no engineering ...”

“... he wrote, ‘and that is, it pours Ideas into our Minds, Words only drop ’em.’ He taught Thomas Hudson, who in turn taught Joseph Wright of Derby and Joshua Reynolds. By the time of his death – suddenly, on sitting down in his chair after his usual morning walk – he owned ‘unspecified’ amounts of bank and South Sea stock, as well as five ...”

“... in Arabic, becomes ‘Forgeron’ or ‘Laforge’; another is to tweak it slightly, so it’s more recognisable to a French ear. If everyone in our family decided on the same French given name and clipped our surname, we could all become Françoise Hardy. For the moment we’re just migrants, watching the host culture with a wary eye, and listening to ...”

“... A contemporary catalogue suggested that it be put on a roller or made into a screen. (Today a more convenient version is available: The A to Z of Georgian London, published in 1982, reproduces the sheets, one to a spread, still perfectly legible, at a little over half-size.) To trace parts of London you know well in Pine’s neat engraving is to learn ...”

“... impressions which most of us have been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his most significant. Three of these impressions can be recorded as a measure of our distance. First, that he is one of the more interesting and tolerable Marxist critics of ...”

“... exactly the friend of sex, or of the sexually symbolic in art: our old friend equivocation is a more helpful companion here, and the paradox of the sexes’ divided response to the female form in allegory is faced by Marina Warner but not fully overcome: she has to seek refuge now and again in a tone less suited to the expert iconographer than to the ...”

“... they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was considering the dietary prohibitions in the Bible, he was puzzled that griffins were listed, commenting that griffins were ‘Poetical Animals, and things of no existence’. The combination of eagle and lion was, he wrote, ‘monstrous’ and ...”

“... attending the demonstration is the young Freud himself, fresh off the train from Vienna. And, more significant, while in Brouillet’s painting the audience’s eyes converge on a female subject who fully obeys the will of her Master, Huston also portrays a male patient, no less hysterical and suggestible than his female counterpart. This might seem ...”

“... French society lay behind the radical left’s hysterical demonisation of Marie-Antoinette, and, more broadly, behind the transition from a paternalistic monarchy to a fraternal republic. That book delved into 18th-century art and literature, gathering up representations of the family from diverse sources and showing how they fit into coherent patterns. In ...”

“... of the Corbett family, ‘who were murdered During the Massacre of the Christians in Delhi’; to Thomas Collins and no fewer than 23 members of his extended family, ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’; to Dr Chimmun Lall, a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the ...”

“... pleaded, for it is a decision of great consequence. ‘You are a milksop,’ Cromwell replied, no more willing to consult flesh and blood on this occasion than he had been five years earlier, ‘by the living God I will dissolve the House.’ Nor had he developed any greater respect for the law while in power. In November 1654, when George Cony, a former ...”

“... and realities of the 20th century. But ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ poetry refers more simply to changes in fashion, the growing up of new groups of designers and a new generation of consumers. Like film images or pop songs, the new in this sense is recognisably different from the poetry scene a generation ago, but how much has happened except ...”

“... canvases develop an eloquent, economical style in which dabs and flourishes of paint suggest, more and more magically as time passes, the glitter of jewellery, the sheen of fabrics and the translucence of flesh. Among these are portraits, and two pictures – The Toilet of Venus and the panoramic Philip IV Hunting Wild ...”

“... also had something to do, on the other hand, with the two most terrifying and exciting images in Thomas Craven’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces: with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated ...”

“... to look after herself: ‘I can’t imagine what will happen if you don’t learn to behave more like other people.’ One reason she found this difficult, even as a child, was that she didn’t know which other people to behave like. On the one hand were the blacks, about whom she had complicated feelings. When she was very young she had wished she was ...”