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“... In part ten​ of Civilisation, Kenneth Clark turned his attention to the Enlightenment, the age of the great amateurs. These were men ‘rich and independent enough to do what they liked’, who nevertheless did things which required considerable ability, men like Lord Burlington, the architect earl. A connoisseur, an ‘arbiter of taste’, Clark explained, ‘the sort of character who these days is much despised ...”

“... This is a film​ about toy trains. These are real toys – not scale models. That doesn’t mean that toys are good and scale models are bad – but they are different.’ To most people, who have never thought of making a moral distinction between toys and scale models, Charles Eames’s schoolmasterly voiceover at the beginning of Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), sets off a chain of ideas ...”

“... If anything​ justifies the use of the word ‘iconic’ to mean an instantly recognisable image with emotive associations it is representations of Churchill. The cigar, the V for Victory sign and the siren suit are the stuff of caricatures, oil portraits and monumental sculpture from Parliament Square to Fulton, Missouri. So potent was his image in the early months of the Second World War that the sculptor Eric Kennington believed it could literally be a weapon ...”

“... Some things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of Domestic Cookery (1805), was furious about misprints in the second edition, including an unfortunate mistake in a recipe for rice pudding ...”

“... At noon on 7 January 1779 the British merchant ship Westmorland, en route from Livorno to England, was captured by two French warships off the Spanish coast. France having joined the War of Independence on the side of the Americans, the Westmorland’s captain, Willis Machell, was prepared for trouble. He had a crew of sixty and 22 cannons, but was outgunned ...”

“... I once found​ a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Class (1979) in the bargain box outside a friend’s second-hand bookshop. When I asked how much it was he winced visibly and said: ‘Just take it, I can’t bear to have it in the shop.’ Subtitled ‘A View from Middle England’ and written in Cooper’s usual rollicking style, it’s a witty read spiked with detailed observations of life in the 1970s and based on the good-natured assumption that everyone is a snob about something and to that extent we are all ridiculous ...”

“... According to​ Herbert Read, ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’ was Victor Pasmore’s conversion from figurative to abstract painting. Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality at Pallant House in Chichester (until 11 June), examines that moment around 1948 and its place in Pasmore’s long career. The essays in the catalogue argue for it variously as a gradual development, latent in his earlier landscapes, or a Damascene conversion ...”

“... Constable​ , as the V&A’s press release puts it, is ‘Britain’s best-loved artist’, and that in a way is the problem. (Constable: The Making of a Master is at the V&A until 11 January.) While his contemporary Turner bestrides the history of European art, Constable remains a largely domestic taste. There was a time when almost every home had a reproduction of The Hay Wain ...”

“... Horace Walpole’s​ Strawberry Hill was the first private house to be built in the Gothic style. It began modestly in 1747 as a suburban riverside villa near Twickenham, leased to a Mrs Chenevix who ran a novelty shop at Charing Cross. Gradually it was transformed into what Walpole, wilfully misquoting Pope, referred to as a Gothic Vatican ...”

“... We had a rag at Monico’s. We had a rag at the Troc,And the one we had at the Berkeley gave the customers quite a shock.Then we went to the Popular, and after that – oh my!I wish you’d seen the rag we had in the Grill Room at the Cri.John​ Betjeman’s ‘’Varsity Rag’ is a hymn to the bright young things of the 1920s, who roared round London’s smartest venues, baying for broken glass ...”

“... Sculpture​ conventionally does one of two things; it either creates space by carving, or creates volume by modelling. Once the material has been cut back or built up, a statue, as the word implies, is static in its relationship to space. Moving sculpture occupies space in a variable way and it has its own history, from devotional objects in the late Middle Ages fitted with clockwork to make Christ’s blood appear to flow, to the lion which Leonardo da Vinci is said to have made, which walked and opened its breast to offer its heart to the king of France ...”

“... I represent things as I see them,’ Aubrey Beardsley said, ‘outlined faintly in thin streaks (just like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar ...”

“... Flower​ arranging occupies a lowly rung in the English cultural hierarchy. Somewhere between handicraft and hobby and associated mostly with women, it conjures up images of 1950s housewives filling the suburban afternoons or savage competition at the WI. Constance Spry had no time for any of that. The first and still one of the few flower arrangers to become a household name, she pointedly distanced herself from the postwar Flower Arrangement Societies she had inadvertently inspired ...”

“... Apotheosis​ can happen to anyone, although in the case of women it is rare. Men, however, are deified with astonishing frequency and their reactions range from bewildered irritation to dismay. While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off ...”

“... Just west​ of Alice Springs is a turn-off marked ‘Flynn’s Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare ...”