“... and drifted into the writing of guidebooks for the expanding railway age. His first publisher was John Murray the third, who wanted an anonymous Handbook on Berks, Bucks and Oxfordshire and insisted on facts, not fancies. Hare regretfully accepted this limitation. Much of his early travelling was done with Maria, by now a prey to hysterical trances. When he ...”

“... to answer. We may study Ruskin for what he has to teach us about 19th-century painting, or about Turner. We can enlarge our knowledge of architecture or of Venetian history from him. We should read him for a fuller understanding of Victorian culture, or to investigate the intellectual roots of those who were influenced by him. We can enjoy and learn from his ...”

“... 50 mph and more. To get an idea of how it felt then, go to the National Gallery and look at Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, which shows a train crossing the Maidenhead bridge. Rain skeins across the picture from the right, sunlight breaks through, white steam and smoke from the engine’s stack are blown to the left. When ...”

“... ever sent from the New World to the Old, so far as is known, was dispatched from the harbour of St John’s, Newfoundland, on 3 August 1527. It was penned by John Rut, captain of the Mary of Guildford, and sent, courtesy of another vessel, to King Henry VIII. It was an espionage report on the French competition, and recorded ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but an artist, interested only in what ...”

“... a fortnight. Spencer’s enthusiasm for garbage is not unique in English art. According to Ruskin, Turner ‘not only could endure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wreck after the market’. His pictures are ‘often full of it, from side to side’ and he ‘delights in shingle, débris, and heaps of fallen stones’. That the stones are ...”

“... with gold embroidery and a ruff so large her head looks as if it were served up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville may have been intended to mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a ...”

“... show buildings that are still quite recognisable today; pictures of the ‘Cromwell curve’, with John Fowler’s concrete bridge of 1867-9, are evidence of the scale of engineering work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... organisers might have borne this in mind when writing some of their condescending text panels. John Bargrave is taken to task for not distinguishing between the ‘categories’ of ‘antiquity’ and ‘curiosity’ in his 17th-century cabinet, but they were not clear categories in his day. Antiquarianism flourished before history was a profession, or ...”

“... shoulder. Seurat and Cézanne haunt the earlier work; later it is Whistler and his Japonisme, Turner and, with the abstract work, Klee. Art historians enjoy spotting influences and the catalogue is full of comparative illustrations that mostly do Pasmore no favours and show him incurring debts he couldn’t repay. Where Klee is playful, Pasmore is playing ...”

“... John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent ...”

“... If you are already aware of John Gray (1866-1934), you may well have a particular interest in the 1890s, or in certain aspects of Catholicism.* You may have fleetingly met the name in period biographies – Beardsley’s, Yeats’s, Wilde’s. Wasn’t Gray supposed to be model for ‘Dorian’? Or you may simply have come across an extraordinary poem called ‘The Flying Fish’, which more than anything has roused and tantalised curiosity ...”

“... for, doubtless with an eye to their principal business, Messrs Sotheby Parke Bernet have carried John Harris’s research in a heavy and lavish volume with 419 plates – some a little grey, alas, but there are 26 good ones in colour. This may not be the first book on the subject, but it is a scholarly work of great scope and interest. As Mr Harris explains ...”