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“... to get this disorderly province of the mind finally under control and to issue a clear map of it. Peter Reynolds, in his admirable book, cites one such map, from an American anthropologist writing in 1901: 1. The mentality of animals is instinctive rather than ratiocinative, and for each species responds practically alike to like stimuli; 2. the savage ...”

“... The Joshua Reynolds​ exhibition at Tate Britain (until 18 September) is subtitled ‘The Creation of Celebrity’. The case for Reynolds as a prime mover in the invention of that modern kind of fame is well made. The catalogue, the wall labels, the little cards with short quotations set in fancy borders which are stuck below some of the pictures, all these help fill out what can be read from the paintings themselves: that Reynolds, in his seven-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week pursuit of reputation, fame and wealth, and in his ardent prosecution of his role as a maker of iconic portraits, not only made likenesses of distinguished literary men, successful courtesans, noblemen, royalty and friends (especially friends, because many of the great and many of the scandalous were also his friends), but gave them a dignity, winsomeness, beauty or authority which the imagination of a literate public, fed with gossip and news from a burgeoning press, recognised and relished ...”

“... I have been reading again The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Barbara Reynolds says that this book – together with her famous series of radio dramas The Man Born to be King – is her greatest work. And Barbara Reynolds should know. She is the goddaughter of Sayers; she is a distinguished Italian scholar and collaborated with Sayers on her translation of The Divine Comedy (a collaboration fascinatingly written up in her book The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L ...”

“... only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as cover for some high-level snitching, but in the annals of ...”

“... all its costly pictures, furniture, and articles of vertu – the magnificent Vandykes; the noble Reynolds pictures; the Lawrence portraits, tawdry and beautiful, and, 30 years ago, deemed as precious as works of real genius.’ ‘Pope Pius VII’ (1819-20) There is much crimson velvet, and many uniforms spangled with stars and sashes, in the ...”

“... of Miss Provis at her easel, her peacock train supported by naked graces. You may well recognise Reynolds in the foreground, rising from the grave with his ear trumpet, but you should also know that Edward Malone, his biographer, said that, were he alive, Reynolds would have subscribed to Miss Provis’s method. The ...”

“... which put him at the same distance from subject and canvas, set at right angles to each other. Reynolds commented that the way the resulting ‘odd scratches and marks’ came together at a distance to give form was, for the painter, a matter of pride: Gainsborough wanted people to look close up and take pleasure in the dance of marks as well as to admire ...”

“... introduction to a monograph of 1901, almost apologised for giving time to the work. Like Joshua Reynolds, he said, he turned from Dou ‘with admiration on the lips but indifference in the heart’.This is the story told by Arthur Wheelock in his essay on Dou’s reputation in the catalogue of the exhibition of his work which can be seen at Dulwich Picture ...”

“... 1936 they had to abandon Chelsea for something more modest. At this low moment Joyce was asked by Peter Fleming, then a leader-writer on the Times, to help enliven the Court Page, whose only light relief from the comings and goings at the Palace was a series of articles about flora and fauna – ‘Woody Plants for Limey Soil’ or ‘Family Cares of the ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. Reading’s vernacular England isn’t to be ...”

“... and Duchess of Gloucester by demanding full payment before he delivered their pictures. But if Reynolds had painted you in London it would have set you back rather more, and a course on Roman antiquities could cost as much as your portrait. Months or even years later the finished portrait would arrive at the family’s country seat. A famous piece of ...”

“... in a view of Leicester Square in 1753 one can spot the obelisks outside the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds on one side and the gilded bust of Van Dyck above Hogarth’s door on the other. By the middle of the 19th century painters were making the fashion as much as following it. Millais put up a grand, if conventional mansion in Knightsbridge and Watts led ...”

“... divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s ...”

“... on ‘society’ in the widest sense, the ensemble des ensembles – neatly translated by Sian Reynolds as the ‘set of sets’ – which discusses the influence on the economy of the social hierarchy, politics and culture. Taken by itself, the analysis offered in Braudel’s second volume appears too static, and its readers should be aware that Braudel ...”

“... into focus, but you seem to recognise them. They are elegant and casual. The people who come with Reynolds are their contemporaries, but the atmosphere changes. The men have more gravitas and fall naturally into classical poses, the women are winsomely theatrical. The aristocratic Van Dycks tend towards the soulful and control the arrangement of their ...”