“... got by on £60 a year and considered himself worse off than ‘a bricklayer’s labourer or the turner of a razor grinder’s wheel’; Basil Hall, the son of James Hall, a baronet and MP, wrote to his father describing the plain sailors’ fare he and the other midshipmen ate at dinner (‘salt beef, pork or ...”

“... century: the period bookended by the birth of William Hogarth, in 1697, and the death of J.M.W. Turner, in 1851. A keen horseman from childhood, Mellon had a particular enthusiasm for landscapes, equestrian art and depictions of traditional countryside pursuits. It is no surprise that works by George Stubbs, the most celebrated equestrian painter of the ...”

“... and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had a more complete architectural education – in Rome – than any of his British contemporaries. He was a Catholic, and his career suffered because of it, but through his buildings at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the churches of St ...”

“... known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the waterfall ...”

“... the African-American Left assailed William Styron’s bestselling novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, as racist and perverted, Genovese carried on a spirited defence of the white author from Virginia and his right to make artistic excursions into history. His next book, The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), moved him further along the right-veering ...”

“... of it or not, all four of them also betray confusion, flux and anxiety. The dust-jacket blurb of James Lees-Milne’s People and Places suggests this right away. His book, it tells us, is an ‘extraordinary, amusing and touching picture ... of an England now lost’. The story will be a familiar one to those who have read his published diaries. In ...”

“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”

“... Yet these ideas underlay the work of two brilliant generations of watercolourists, of whom Turner was only the most famous, at one of those historic moments when art, ideas and technique all reach the same pitch at the same time. Girtin, Sandby and their successors, Cotman and the tantalisingly short-lived Richard Bonington, captured as no painters ...”

“... on spreading the good word that ‘metropolitan improvements’ – the upbeat title of a book by James Elmes which Shepherd illustrated – were steadily bringing into existence a city whose size, wealth and new look were rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London ...”

“... his company’s public repertoire at the Globe, received its first documented performance before James I’s court at Whitehall on 26 December 1606. It was then printed in 1608, as M. William Shak-speare, his True Chronicle History of the life and death of King LEAR and his three daughters, but even after spending fifteen years or more training and nerving ...”

“... techniques; and the historians of popular culture have borrowed freely, especially from Victor Turner and Darnton’s acknowledged mentor, Clifford Geertz, whose principal concern has been with culture as a system of meanings, as, in Geertz’s phrase, an ‘acted document’. But the historian faces problems the anthropologist does not. His material is ...”

“... first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He is equally familiar with the facial ...”

“... bear fruit and they were unable to pay the rent. Around this time, Clare fell in love with Martha Turner (‘Patty’), who lived in a secluded cottage between Casterton and Pickworth and whose parents were socially a bit above the Clares. Clare was already writing poetry, inspired by Thomson’s Seasons, which he had first read as a 13-year-old in a ...”

“... planting the flag in Landsmark’s body. The man who appears to restrain Landsmark in the photo, James Kelly, an anti-busing leader and later a city councilman, was actually trying to prevent the assault. The photos Forman took next show that Kelly interposed himself between Rakes and Landsmark, calming the crowd. Forman’s photograph alone is an inadequate ...”

“... the unquestioning service he performs for Lord Darlington, an aristocratic English Nazi, played by James Fox. ‘Let us make a film in which the representation of fascism would engage with the fascism of representation,’ Rose writes. ‘A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with ...”