“... book, The Tennis Court Oath, he announced: ‘I attempt to use words abstractly, as an abstract painter would use paint.’ So the ‘representational’ style of ‘Self-Portrait’ is unrepresentative of some of the abstract difficulties encountered elsewhere in his work. The poem acts more like the accurate sketch of a face which an abstract ...”

“... Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can ...”

“... Whether by happy accident or design, the publication of Peter Jackson’s George Scharf’s London coincided with the opening of a notable exhibition at the Museum of London called simply ‘Londoners’. Although Scharf’s oeuvre is most readily classified as topographical art, his sketches are as descriptive of the everyday Londoners who went about their lawful pursuits in the decades between 1820 and 1850 as they are of sides of the emerging metropolis which down to that time were largely neglected by the best-known London iconographers ...”

“... School’ to arrive in the city just as this cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert ...”

“... a solitary beach hut by a seawall (not at the RA), foreshadows the bare paintings of the Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison. Tree behind a Wall, from 1936, could be a George Shaw. But Spilliaert is best seen in his own time, in the moody coastal gloom of Ostend, and the shadowy rooms of his ...”

“... to me too. To love Rubens is to accept that he fails where other great painters succeed. No painter can do everything. But the source of Rubens’s failures may also be the source of his unparalleled energy, charm and inventiveness.Take the way he paints Jesus’ dead body as it is taken down from the cross. His greatest version of this subject is in ...”

“... 20th century has little to do with a battle in the studio between man, paint and canvas – the painter as hero was becoming the artist as ironist.Lichtenstein’s change of direction was of the kind which creates the illusion that art has a goal – or at least suggests that style change follows patterns. That one force draws style towards classic ...”

“... become, like sport, a specialised affair, and Burgess himself is taken seriously along with it. George Walden, chairman of this year’s Booker Prize, quoted Burgess as a contemporary sage, whose dictum on what a good novel should be like was given as a guideline to his judging panel. Such a novel should leave in the mind ‘a sort of philosophical ...”

“... of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much ...”

“... to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style’), it made him realise ‘the English richness of George Eliot’ and ‘the superiority of English culture and the English mind to the French’. In this he was expressing New England’s special sense of the English as well as of the French. He moved to London at the end of 1876, and installed himself at once ...”

“... possibly therapeutic bed. Observers on each side – one suited, one nude (both Bacon’s lover George Dyer) – keep company with animalistic figures. Others were just-for-the-sake-of-it nudes, such as Gabrielle avec la chemise ouverte, one of Renoir’s ‘problem nudes’, which shows Gabrielle Renard, his wife’s cousin and the family nanny, with her ...”

“... actionable on all counts: at a time of intense alarm around the first Jacobite Rising, it compared George I to Nero, threatened his destruction and called for the reinstatement of the ‘real’ royal line across the water. ‘Let us in Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile ...”

“... on (for example) those repetitious heads with both eyes on the same side? It’s as though the painter has said: ‘I’m going to give you a version of “reality”, but in such a way that you will never be able to pass effortlessly through the medium of paint into a world you know already. I will continually interrupt your recognitions and make you ...”

“... up a small annual pension to a widow in Shropshire; parishes that were more pressed – like St George the Martyr in Southwark, which included several debtors’ prisons with their collateral burdens of wives and children lodging nearby – had to weigh up their choices: they could give casual relief, or insist that claimants return to their home parish ...”

“... explained by a visit Yeats’s last lover, Edith Shackleton, made to Roquebrune accompanied by the painter Gluck, in the summer of 1947. This is what Gluck’s biographer, Diana Souhami, reports: the two women, having searched in vain for Yeats’s grave, questioned the local priest, Abbé Biancheri, and Pierre Reynault, director of Maison Roblot, a firm of ...”