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“... reaping the profits of a business. To accomplish this double manoeuvre, as we learn from Anne Sebba’s book, she had to find a man who would not only be a clever business partner but a dominating sort of husband, for whom she could play The Angel while managing refractory children household and business accounts, creative projects and inner ...”

“... The jacket photo​ for Kafka’s Clothes shows him without any, sitting tailor-fashion on a beach, smiling above naked shoulders and a thin chest, the prominent ears rhyming with prominent bony knees. His swimming trunks are obscured in shadow. It’s not at all the stiff-collared, well-buttoned Kafka we’re used to, and the one introduced in the interior of this study is also unfamiliar ...”

“... This book is a cry of pure pain, immensely difficult to read without groaning and sometimes weeping and getting up to pace the floor. Its flavour is aptly illustrated by the shocking jacket photograph of Nijinsky undergoing a catatonic seizure at the age of 37, about eight years after he wrote this text. With his necktie neatly knotted, his face shaven and his hair combed, hands curled up, the greatest dancer of his epoch – some say of any epoch – stares into the lens with a horrifying sacrificial patience ...”

“... Isadora Duncan refused to be filmed while she danced. The most eager prophet of modern bodily movement avoided the great new vessel of the truth a motion – unwilling, it would seem, to do without the audience rapport that was indispensable to her success. Her reluctance went with her noticeably religious attitude toward her own dancing, and toward art in general ...”

“... Gabrielle Chanel is famous for the Little Black Dress, the Chanel Suit and Chanel No 5. The three can effectively sum up the Modern Woman, suggesting female elegance without pretension and feminine allure without musk and whalebone. The Chanel style precludes the traditional forms of guile by which women have been supposed to arouse a man’s desire in order to lay hands on his money, rather than match his lust with their own ...”

“... The first striking thing about Gilles Lipovetsky’s book is the complete absence of illustrations, even diagrams and graphs. This may be the first book about fashion without pictures – even Roland Barthes used diagrams. Of course, Balzac’s ‘Physiologie de la toilette’ didn’t have any, but that originally appeared in a magazine, and journal publication can preclude pictures even now ...”

“... Like Titian’s, Cartier-Bresson’s work began as the mirror of one epoch and is ending as that of another, simply because he invented the best mirror and kept polishing it Cartier-Bresson’s influence has been immense since his beginnings, not just on photography but on cinema and photojournalism, so that he has been largely responsible for 20th-century notions of what a superior realistic camera image should look like ...”

“... Arshile Gorky is better known for his role in 20th-century American art than he is for his actual work. The collective memory, besides noting that his art reputedly links 1930s Surrealism to 1950s Abstract Expressionism, is rather vague about his pictures: were they realistic? Abstract? Easier to remember that he committed suicide, that he was a romantic character, that he was a liar ...”

“... and ‘ghostly’. Laura, rich and timid, is praised for her unassuming and fragile white attire; Anne, poor and mad, wears white garments made of coarse fabrics. The true heroine, however, is dark, ‘ugly’ Marian, whom only the villain openly admires, though the narrator notes her lithe figure. Marian is swarthy, moustached and wears no stays, facts that ...”

“... Alice Rawsthorn begins her book about Yves St Laurent with a dramatic prologue evoking a period late in the designer’s career, specifically the end of January and the beginning of February 1990. This opening functions as a sort of morality play, suggesting how we might view the story that follows. Yves St Laurent is introduced receiving a 13-minute ovation for his 1990 spring couture collection, a show comprising many dazzling examples of his homage to the clients, artists and predecessors who have inspired him for thirty years ...”

“... The death of Martha Graham on 1 April 1991, a little more than a month before her 97th birthday, finally permitted Agnes DeMille to publish her biography of the dancer, after nearly twenty-five years of work and four years of waiting. It is a measure of DeMille’s reverence for Graham that she should have withheld until after Graham’s death what is by any standards an affectionate and appreciative account of her life and art, rather than risk offending Graham’s own sense of herself in the slightest degree ...”

“... Fashion was always famous for its power, but only quite recently have people believed it has meaning. From time to time during the last two hundred years, writers have uneasily asserted that everything important about individuals, even about whole civilisations, could be learned from what people wore; but by the end of the 20th century, the meaning of clothing had become a respectable subject in its own right ...”

“... The frontispiece to this biographical study is an unknown photographer’s portrait of the bearded Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) taken in about 1872. He sits awkwardly hunched on a crate with his back against a sequoia, grimly frowning into the distance, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a rumpled three-piece suit. His ragged trouser hems are prominent in the foreground, along with his muddy wrinkled boots ...”

“... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...”

“... Lee Miller invented her first name as if to veil her femaleness when she was a society beauty and fashion model in the 1920s. It went along with a new shift in the style of sexual excitement, a new pleasure in androgyny: what Carolyn Burke discreetly calls ‘a redistribution of sexual energies’.Later, her neutral first name helped to advance her short New York career as a professional portrait photographer, before women were wholly welcome in the field; and much later, long after she had distinguished herself as a French Surrealist icon and a British war correspondent, her name could sometimes be confused with Lee Friedlander’s, even though he was a very different artist with a long-term, stable fame ...”