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“... Over six feet tall​ and thin as wire, with Slavic cheekbones and a ‘Wild West moustache’, Nikola Tesla combined confidence and charisma with a gift for big tech, electro-prophecy and bullshit. He was a near perfect Thomas Pynchon character, and his cameo appearance in Pynchon’s Against the Day in 2006 confirmed his status as a counter-cultural hero ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... for the requisite extractions) on her 21st birthday, or the occasion of her first marriage. As Richard Barnett points out in his excellent text for The Smile Stealers, it wasn’t uncommon up until the late 1930s for young women to receive just such a benison – the reification, if you like, of the great relief to be obtained once those ...”

“... and Alison Smithson, who displayed a series of found objects in a post-apocalyptic mirrored shed. Richard Hamilton’s group presented a funfair vision that launched the British Pop Art movement. Robby the Robot, star of the science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, opened the show because, according to the critic Reyner Banham, he was much ‘easier to book ...”

“... it gifts from artists, is mainly drawings and prints. They were hung in subsidiary spaces – the Barnett Newman etching and lithograph in the kitchen, the de Kooning drawings on the stairs. In the two main rooms half a dozen pieces, bathed in diffused daylight, didn’t so much offer themselves up for attention as demand it. The pieces he chose for the ...”

“... Mary Cassatt to Georgia O’Keeffe to Eva Hesse; from the Shakers’ minimalism (good) to that of Barnett Newman (bad); from Bierstadt’s expansive, theatrical Western vistas to Edward Hopper’s cramped, seedy urban interiors. Although a lot of words are expended on matters that have more to do with social and political history than with art, Hughes is ...”

“... and Harpenden would no doubt be trying to get his hands on any proceeds from Dirty Dealing; and Richard Ashcroft, a solicitor in the property department at Withers, would be trying to supplement his income with the royalties from Alone with Everybody and various old Verve albums (at the risk of being sued by the Rolling Stones). My name has been used ...”

“... the People in their rucksacks. Primus inter people is the founding director of Charter 88, Anthony Barnett, whose book attempts to recapture for his constitutionalist tendency the drama of ‘our constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially in our ...”

“... the British champion and a Shakespearian scholar, speaking in witty, allusive pentameters; Richard Morphy, his young American challenger, with a suitably wilder six-stress line, barely controlled by a caesura in the middle. Staunton addresses his wife, while Morphy writes to his mother, and both women, though silent, are felt as strong dramatic ...”

“... heart’. She fosters nostalgie de la banlieue, the feeling that made one wish V. S. Pritchett and Richard Cobb would never get to the last page of their childhood memories. You could adapt the famous remark about religious sects and say that England has sixty kinds of suburb and only one sauce – except that sixty would be an underestimate and all of them ...”

“... on her paper ‘Cinderella Organises Buttons’. She cowered in the pub lavatory to escape Anthony Barnett, who had been detailed by the board to fetch her, while he stood outside demanding that she come out and discuss her article ‘rationally and politically’. A week later the board received her letter of resignation, which suggested that ‘they sit ...”

“... in particular, of the studio research undertaken by Matisse and Mondrian, and later by Barnett Newman, in their separate journeys towards abstraction capture a thrilling sense of ambition and discovery. He is also good on the reinstatement of Russian Productivism and Constructivism as central episodes in the development of Modernist ...”

“... Aids is simply called matenda a boma, the ‘government disease’. In Tanzania, report Tony Barnett and Piers Blaikie in Aids in Africa, the acronym itself has been recast as Acha Iniue Dogodogo Siachi, a Swahili phrase meaning ‘Let it kill me as I will never abandon young ladies’. And in Côte d’lvoire, Sida, the French version of the ...”

“... R.G. Collingwood, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell, Adrian Stokes, Tony Crosland – as he calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, John Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any ...”

“... It is interesting that Richard Serra, who is not short of offers of highly promising locations for which to make site-specific sculptures, accepted the Tate’s invitation to do something in their domineering central hall – a space ostensibly built for showing sculpture but serving that purpose rather badly, partly because it makes the things put into it look as if they were lost at the bottom of a well, partly because its huge Ionic columns dwarf other forms in the same field of vision ...”