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“... So it’s not in my nature to come out as a revolutionary enthusiast. But shouldn’t someone do it? That person, as it turns out, is China Miéville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist sympathies whose fiction is self-described as ‘weird’. Miéville is not a historian, though he has done his homework, and his October is not at all ...”

“... turning pro-tsarist. In fact, the Romanovs were in general dutiful, hard-working and determined to do as much good for Russia as they were capable of. But their deification – Nicholas will probably be canonised before the year is out – is also absurd: the Romanovs were in general inept, remote, narrow-minded, anti-semitic, intolerant, repressive and ...”

“... The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in representations of Christ, both as an infant and as an adult, the genitals had a particular theological significance to which we are now oblivious because of the modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity ...”

“... principal’s office to be taught their manners. In what is perhaps the most nightmarish of the Dr Seuss books, the ‘cat’ who enters the home after the mother has gone out is clearly up to no good because he keeps his hat on. The social necessity that hats be worn outside and removed inside resulted in a serious storage problem. One solution for top-hat ...”

“... painting, for the older kind of dialogue with tradition broke down; the criticism of Leo Steinberg, so delicate in its way of relating a work to its context in the oeuvre, so subtle about the now very complex relation to tradition, is a model of the right sort of response. But in writing about fiction we experience some vulgar inhibition that may ...”

“... Greenberg to champion Abstract Expressionism, and deftly deflected its discourse towards what Leo Steinberg would term ‘other criteria’. ‘The subjects which Jasper Johns chose to paint up to 1958,’ Steinberg wrote in ‘Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art’ (1962), still the most influential essay on the ...”

“... at 8.30 a.m. The party’s ‘diversity’ arises from what Amendola called ‘un orgoglio di partito’, ‘a pride of party’, that pride in being a Communist which, he writes, restrained Communist prisoners from masturbating during their imprisonment and made them ashamed that they could not discipline their dreams. I saw it in the contempt with ...”

“... but also in conceptual gestures? It was during this time, too, that Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning, whom he greatly admired, for a drawing, which he then laboriously erased. This is a bizarre collaboration, but a collaboration nonetheless, and this distinctive aspect of his artistic practice was also developed on Fulton Street. Although the White ...”

“... dignity and heroic forbearance of the Everyman-Sisyphus figure pushing his rock – or, as Saul Steinberg has it in the old cartoon, pushing a huge, boulder-like question-mark – up a hill. The poems that elicited most controversy were the cycles ‘Landscapes’ and ‘List’. Here’s ‘On the Table’, a poem from ...”

“... in a similar way, anticipating and completing each other across stretches of time. It is we who do not think in this manner: informed by humanists like Panofsky, art historians in particular understand Renaissance perspective not only as a revolutionary technique of picture-making but also as an epochal form of historical consciousness that allowed for ...”

“... it is closed, and on the spur of the moment she takes the boys to the nearby Musée National d’Art Moderne. For Bois the memory is vivid to this day. There is the Brancusi studio donated to the French state by the Romanian sculptor, a room of Léger paintings, a huge ‘allover’ canvas by the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, a great Matisse ...”