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“... artists; even their names very often went unrecorded. The patrons have clearer identities. One, Claude Martin, was a vinegar distiller’s son from Lyon, who joined the Compagnie des Indes only to desert the French for the British East India Company. He made a fortune – exactly how hasn’t been established – and built himself palaces, amassed a ...”

“... is by Zoffany, the society portraitist. Painted in 1786, it shows Polier at home with his friends Claude Martin, John Wombwell, the paymaster to the Company’s troops, and, in the background, with his head turned towards the viewer and painting another picture, Zoffany himself. Although Polier affects a long, drooping ‘Indian’ moustache and wears a ...”

“... friends the writer (and Protestant) Jean Schlumberger and the novelist and Nobel Prizewinner Roger Martin du Gard, both of whom were bisexual, though less conspicuously so. They accompanied him on his adventures or exchanged letters with him about his encounters with adolescents, and they almost never reproached him. More often, they encouraged him and took ...”

“... Since I am about to comment on other people’s published reactions to Martin Amis’s novel Other People, it seems right to state in summary form my own feelings on the main matters that divided the reviewers. I thought it a remarkable work, highly readable and enjoyable, not incomprehensible or unduly difficult ...”

“... a term which is prominent on the title-page of the account of the case published in 1561. Martin Guerre was a peasant, of Basque origin but settled in the village of Artigat in the French South-West, between Toulouse and Foix. He married a local girl, Bertrande de Rols, when they were in their early teens; ten years later, he disappeared. Eight years ...”

“... on them saying ‘Coloured’ and ‘White’ – she soon falls in with the bohemian crowd around Claude de la Fontaine, the scion of an old Creole family. Tall, tanned and terrified, Claude caps every evening with a drink, ‘a libation to the god of nightmares . . . Not to stop him from having nightmares. He was asking ...”

“... a large loan exhibition of the Welsh ‘father of English landscape’, Richard Wilson, curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced collection of colour ...”

“... in 1979. The two principal biographies, still widely used as works of reference, and which Martin Battestin’s long-awaited volume is designed to supersede, are those of Wilbur Cross (1918) and F. Homes Dudden (1952). Cross has usually been treated as the standard work, while Dudden’s book has had a bad press. In my undergraduate days I heard dons ...”

“... he has never seen any Place that affords a Subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude. Paul Sanby is the only Man of Genius, he believes, who has employ’d his Pencil that Way – Mr G hopes Lord Hardwicke will not mistake his meaning, but if his Lordship wishes to have any thing tolerable of the name of G. the Subject altogether as well ...”

“... a whole more democratic, savvy political entrepreneurs like the Social Democratic Spitzenkandidat Martin Schulz wanted the Parliament to assert its power to decide the president of the Commission – not just to consent to the Council’s choice, as envisaged in the treaty. For a while, everyone went along with this useful fiction: even Angela ...”

“... to have been committed, the fact is never, I believe, stated in so many words, whereas in Pincher Martin, where cannibal images abound, they are figurative of aggressive sexual or exploitative behaviour of a non-ingestive kind. Cannibal situations occur not infrequently in fictions of what might broadly be called the realist tradition, from Defoe ...”

“... into mere interpretative novelty’: it’s a relief to hear that somebody dislikes it. Actually, Martin Dodsworth dislikes it too. He contributes a primly disapproving piece on formalism, structuralism and post-structuralism to the latest volume of Boris Ford’s ‘Pelican Guide’. It’s one of three essays broadly surveying the ‘theory’ scene, the ...”

“... The authors of this collection of essays are social anthropologists who follow the structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, literally – an essay by him comes first, after Daniel Miller’s introduction – and, in varying degrees, intellectually. What they discover when they unwrap Christmas present – Christmas now, throughout the world – are the human structures of the cover-up, disguising, beneath a number of hilarious cultural transformations, a tragic opposition between the glittery surface and the dark heart of Christmas ...”

“... personhood. The whole joke is gathered up into a massive concluding spectacle, surreal in a John Martin way: Thus Lechery’s great Martyr, Revelling in Fire,    At every Pore dripping out Scalding Lust,    With all thy Strength collected in one Thrust, At gaping C– –t, thou didst give up thy mighty Ghost, And ’midst a Glorious heap of burning ...”

“... even a proto-Abstract Expressionist. The latter interpretation makes his emulation of Claude, or Rembrandt a temporary scaffolding rather than a dialogue. The former can show how hard it is to separate the ‘synthetic details’, the high operatic drama of legends, and the general theme of man and nature, from the ‘ocean of pictorial ...”