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“... A ccording to​ Stephen Campbell, around 250 books about Leonardo were published at the time of the 500th anniversary of his death in 2019, of which about fifty were biographies. It is hard to imagine any other painter or sculptor, living or dead, ever attracting this kind of attention, but it is equally hard to attribute it to Leonardo’s artistic talent, especially as he is chiefly known for one work, the Mona Lisa (or two, if one considers the almost wholly repainted Last Supper ...”

“... to give figurative painting seriousness and weight. As it is, Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of Stephen Spender upstages a row of portraits by Lamb, Coldstream and John because of its linear clarity and bite, and a Matthew Smith holds your eye by force of juicy paint and saturated colour alone. Yet thin paint in the work of Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash is ...”

“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties ...”

“... in 2015? George and Ed are trying to hoover up the crumbs left by Rory (Stewart) and Alastair (Campbell), whose podcast, The Rest Is Politics, is a freak sensation – even selling out the Royal Albert Hall for a live recording – and a source of succulent profit. George and Ed, we know, are real good pals, but Rory and Alastair were an arranged ...”

“... and building disturb the electrical currents in the surrounding atmosphere, while Hardy W. Campbell, billed in the Milwaukee Road pamphlets as ‘the noted farming expert and inventor of the Campbell system of scientific farming for semi-arid lands’, had shown how to make dry soil fertile: compact the soil at root ...”

“... treated the sculptures as if they were landscapes or people in the street. Two young Englishmen, Stephen Haweis and Henry Coles, who photographed many of them in the early 1900s, preferred to take their pictures at sunset. Some of the images they made, in which detail is buried in deep shadow, are as soft and dark as heavily inked etchings. Rodin himself ...”

“... these local references are displaced and international reputations established. In his preface to Stephen Coppel’s catalogue, Antony Griffiths tells how the material made its way into the museum’s collection. The exhibition, which carries on until 7 September, shows how the knowledge, intelligence and enthusiasm of curators made it possible in quite ...”

“... as possible. Although making sense in and of the world is not irrelevant to a review of Alastair Campbell’s first novel, All in the Mind, it was my initial plan, after reading it, to extend the preliminary discussion of the niceties of sanity and madness to about 2975 words, after which I would round up to a respectable 3000 words with a final ...”

“... Potter, the producer, asks Stella, the heroine of An Awfully Big Adventure, what she thinks J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner is about, she says: ‘Love. People loving people who love somebody else.’ He explains that she is mistaken, and that it is mostly about time. An Awfully Big Adventure is about people – members of the Liverpool Repertory ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”

“... but at least once in modern times in England too. On the sanguine side, my colleague Quentin Campbell, in the days when he was a stipendiary magistrate and so sat unwigged, was passed in a dark street by a car, pulsing with sound, which stopped dead. A black youth got out, marched over to him and said: ‘I know you – you’re at Marylebone ...”

“... Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his predecessors became known as one of the new terrors of death, and whose Life of Mansfield contains at least one palpable fabrication. In the 20th century two scholars, Edmund Heward and ...”

“... untrustworthy when they project the marital plans of Liberal widowers, neither Rosebery nor Campbell-Bannerman acquired second wives, as predicted, although the reader is permitted to infer otherwise. A considerable number of stories, including some recounted at unpardonable length, deal with the domestic activities of individuals whom the diarist never ...”

“... of O’Brian’s fictional heroes, Jack Aubrey, with the passion for natural history of another, Stephen Maturin. Moreover O’Brian’s accounts in his novels of 18th-century seamanship are, like Tolstoy’s battle pieces, better historical description than most historians manage: it was clear that the variety of incident in Banks’s voyage to the Great ...”

“... his considerable commercial and critical success, was often very publicly under attack. Much of Stephen Gardiner’s biography is taken up with what critics and journalists said about Epstein’s work, but he doesn’t really ask what was in it that so irritated some and gave such pleasure to others. Gardiner is too often rhetorically ‘puzzled’ by ...”