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“... very least curious about his methods. One of the ‘Generation of Giants’ that gave its name to George Dunne’s classic study of the first Jesuit missionaries in China, Ricci remains a figure of enduring fascination both in China and in Europe, often used as a model of how mutual respect can be shown between intellectuals from different cultures. Ricci is ...”

“... set for a distinguished career, but he never attained his goals. Granted, he came to fame as a painter. He was socially successful. He frequented the interesting Godwin circle for years. Later on, we find him all over London, not only in the company of artists but at lectures with Faraday, the theatre with Kemble and Macready, at dinner with the ...”

“... achieve any liking for a prissily portentous symbolical six-footer by the now unfamiliar George Boughton, and yet Boughton mattered much to Van Gogh, and pioneered the composition to which Miners in the Snow was indebted. In similar fashion, Van Gogh would later fall in love with the intentions conveyed by Puvis de Chavannes in an allegorical ...”

“... inattentiveness and whimsicality happen on a new order of things. One that escapes, so the painter hopes, from the normal post-Miró play of deskilling and encounters the silliness of the world. Of the world, not of painting. This seems to me Twombly’s vision of Arcadia: a condition very close to acedia, granted, but where the scruffiness and ...”

“... Ramsay, the Edinburgh Scot who trained in Rome and Naples (whose portraits, wrote the engraver George Vertue, were ‘rather lick’t than pencilld’), offered British clients who had grown tired of the native tradition an aura of ‘cosmopolitan sophistication’, a ‘more emphatic flavour of modernity’. Ramsay’s portraits, Vertue wrote, were ...”

“... away the tissue to leave visible the injected passages. Perhaps its odd beauty appealed to the painter too, but it was undoubtedly included as evidence of the anatomist’s technical accomplishment. Above is another jar, containing a specimen that only a few of Hunter’s fellow professionals would have recognised: the metacarpal bone of an ass showing a ...”

“... were from Methodist stock, their paternal grandfather had been ordained by Wesley. Their father, George, was also a minister who, throughout their childhood, was sent from mission to mission in Birmingham, Sheffield and London. Flanders is good on the domestic implications of this and much else. It was their mother, Hannah, who bore the brunt of the struggle ...”

“... incidents from childhood and late adolescence in which she was sexually molested by Gerald and George Duckworth, the Stephen sisters’ half-brothers by their mother’s first marriage. Poole drew on these memoirs, on a letter in which Woolf recalled George Duckworth ‘fondling’ her over her Greek lessons, and on the ...”

“... in 1887 (she was older, Woolf later realised, than she looked in 1918) she was the first child of George Sitwell, fourth baronet, and his beautiful young wife, Ida, ‘my frightful mother’. From birth she was a disappointment, ‘in disgrace for being a girl’, and as she grew up matters got worse. She was too tall to be feminine, her nose was large and ...”

“... the novel leaves unsaid. A coda, flashing forward to 1953, explains the title. Bryan is now a painter of reputation, with a talent which a recent reviewer has termed ‘prodigal’. He has returned to home ground for the Coronation street-party (now, it seems, hitched up with Margaret, the farmer’s daughter he played with as a child). But despite the ...”

“... There used to be a mosaic of President George Bush on the floor at the entrance to the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. It was placed there soon after the first Gulf War in 1991 and was a good likeness, though the artist gave Bush unnaturally jagged teeth and a slightly sinister grimace. The idea was that nobody would be able to get into the hotel, where most foreign visitors to Iraq stayed in the 1990s, without stepping on Bush’s face ...”

“... but a makeshift coathanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.14 January. George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at 11.30, ...”

“... artist’s own photographs. Opposite the mud circles are some large pictures made by Gilbert and George. They also first attracted attention in the Sixties with a new conception of art, but of a different sort. Gilbert and George (we are not told their full names) went in for camp self-advertisement in the manner of Andy ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither ...”

“... depicted them as a literary fab foursome, with Knausgaard the cute Paul and Fosse the spiritual George.) Fosse did once dabble in painting, though his greater passion was for music (‘I came to writing from rock music. A kind of almost imperceptible transition, from the guitar to the typewriter’) and there’s a scene in Septology in which the teenage ...”