“... their fathers or husbands, painting before an audience was a means of demonstrating autonomy. In May 1664, Cosimo, Grand Prince of Tuscany, joined the visitors who packed into Elisabetta Sirani’s studio in Bologna to watch her paint a breastfeeding scene. Having established the first secular art school for girls after inheriting her father’s ...”

“... injustice to the unprotected.’ The fact that he is not also molested in the introduction may be a gratifying mark of the respect still shown towards the episcopate by Conservatives in Oxford. But both Plant and Sykes seem to have walked unwarily into the common room of All Souls from another sort of conclave or conventicle in which they would have ...”

“... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...”

“... American writer deserving revival, but they take very different approaches to her life and work. David Roberts was mesmerised by this ‘enigmatic, thwarted writer’ and sought to unravel her story with the help of Eve Auchincloss, Stafford’s friend and editor, and her 42-year correspondence with ex-lover and friend Robert Hightower. He paints a ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... which appeared under Mr Major’s name in various newspapers during the campaign – which may be why they read better than some examples of the genre. Nevertheless, these sorts of book are in perpetual danger of sliding from hard-nosed reportage into a glutinous ‘lives of the saints’ approach to their subjects and their immediate ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... Union, but her independent – and extreme – militancy caused a breach. In the words of David Mitchell, a biographer of Christabel Pankhurst, she became ‘an incorrigible freelance’. In the summer of 1913, newsreel cameras captured her running across the course of the most popular race of the year, the Epsom Derby, falling under a horse and lying ...”

“... it might be a dictatorship, it was an enlightened and progressive one. As for Egypt, Anthony Eden may have described Nasser as ‘that Hitler on the Nile’, but after the 1978 Camp David Accords the country became a pillar of American interests in the Middle East and – by its withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict ...”

“... The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it ...”

“... not neglected, but more context and commentary are required if they are to be understood. Palumbo may have been inspired in his conduct by American museum trustees, who often, and not always unreasonably, behave as if they own the institution they represent. It was under Thatcher that the traditional role of the museum trustee in this country began to be ...”

“... on 28 January and 8 February 1779 have always been connected with the joint portrait, but may well have concerned the poet’s courtship of Reynolds’s niece. In any case, Jackson was certain that Bampfylde’s rejection marked ‘the commencement of his madness’, adding that ‘on being refused admittance at Sir Joshua’s he broke the ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... Catholic priests, bringing hundreds to trial for alleged paedophilia. Some of these accusations may well have been based in fact, but many were not; the regime exploited them to secularise Catholic schools and close down many other lay institutions. Relations continued to deteriorate, and hundreds of German Catholic priests were imprisoned in concentration ...”