“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 68-78. I have cheated slightly by removing a single line, but even so this passage would look much more at home in the speech in which the old king tells Cordelia’s hitherto enthusiastic suitor Burgundy that her price is now fallen than it does in its actual dramatic context. The speech forms part of a long, irrelevant piece of dissimulation in which the ...”

“... set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A ferryman to whom they gave a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... outside, the lawyers who stood between the accused and the gallows commanded admiration, and none more than William Garrow, the most successful and most celebrated defence counsel of the later Georgian years. To Langbein, however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as ...”

“... of posterity’; this died, inevitably, with the Coalition in 1922, but a close relation emerged more than twenty years later in the famous TUC Carthouse –‘a dear old thing’, Low wrote, ‘with a noble past and probably a glorious future’. There had also been carthorses in his Australian days, as well as a number of proto-Blimps. Low created his ...”

“... takes it seriously on its own terms? Such an account need not involve ‘belief’ in it, any more than a sympathetic account of Newton’s alchemical experiments need imply that the philosopher’s stone really exists, or admiration for Hobbes (Boyle’s chief critic) any reluctance to use a Vacu-Vin. Geneva focuses on Lilly’s prognostications of ...”

“... volatile moment, then, Schwitters was attacked from both sides, and his reputation has remained more or less stuck in that limbo ever since: too blatant for some, too bourgeois for others.In Poisoned Abstraction, Graham Bader presents the conflict between actual refuse and abstract composition not as an obstacle to the work but as our way into it. In doing ...”