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“... inspired one of de Acosta’s first plays, about an imaginary love affair between the painter and his model.) Though Rita’s last years were troubled – her health was frail and she went broke in 1927 when Callot Soeurs sued her for non-payment of bills – she never lost her talismanic (and one suspects eroticised) place in her sister’s ...”

“... he also allowed his house to be used for divine service and was actively involved in petitioning George I for assistance in building an English church. Indeed, few seemed to expect high moral standards from clerics or from the clergymen-tutors who accompanied young bucks on their Grand Tours; one reports a conversation at dinner, in which he was asked ...”

“... has been some Christian vicar or nature study slant: he has edited selections from Wordsworth and George Herbert and compiled a Penguin Book of Religious Verse. Out of church, he has kept fairly silent, confining his enthusiasms to co-Celts like Yeats and Mac-Diarmid and to the odd American, like Wallace Stevens. Thomas’s favourite Larkin poem, he says, is ...”

“... on his formative years in rural Surrey. Although trained in the architectural office of Ernest George and Harold Peto, the older of whom was an able vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen ...”

“... venomous account of the dinner Vickie, at her husband’s insistence, cooks for Anna. It could be George Eliot squashing Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch. With such endearing maladress is the thing done that the dully inscrutable Anna is abruptly lent the quietly formidable sharpness of her creator, and becomes her mouthpiece for the duration of the ...”

“... with the stories they told. In many cases, the person rose vividly from the programme. The painter Mary Fedden, Catherine’s friend, was ‘celebrated’ at St James’s Church in Piccadilly on 18 October 2012. The event started with ‘The Painter’s Eye’, a talk by Philip Trevelyan, son of Mary’s late ...”

“... as an amateur archaeologist he unearthed several Roman items and bought Bell and Beaker bowls from George Bonsor’s dig at Carmona. More controversial was his purchase of the library of Spanish literature amassed by the Marquesado de Jerez de los Caballeros, head of the Andalusian Bibliophile Society. The impact of this transaction was described by the ...”

“... with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of ...”

“... In the Tate Gallery St Ives exhibition catalogue for 1995 there is a comical photograph of the painter Bryan Wynter and some friends at Zennor in themid-1950s. They are seated round a bottle-strewn table. Wynter is smiling absently, Karl Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness ...”

“... with various displays of grossness; later on, he detested his son’s chosen mate, Gala. The painter was to take elaborate revenge in a series of works about an ogre called William Tell, Dalí’s variation on the Oedipus complex in which the father takes the active role. But it was the more obvious 1929 sketch of the Sacred Heart, on which was scrawled ...”

“... talented artists until their vessels were scuttled by fame, or barnacled with fame-seekers. The painter John Minton had been boyish and agreeable. Maclaren-Ross remembered him in Soho, about the time Muriel Belcher opened her place. He saw him dancing down Dean Street to the Colony, ‘his long loose-jointed figure in a sort of petty officer’s pea jacket ...”

“... to the whimsical. An instance of self-aware pseudomorphism is a gallery curated by the American painter Amy Sillman; titled ‘The Shape of Shape’, it is a mélange of 71 works, some old, some new, by 71 artists, some familiar, some not, that feature mostly abstract forms suggestive of body parts. An example of effective anachronism is the inclusion of ...”

“... only Wagner can be said to have secured an ‘ism’ (following her trip to Weimar in 1855, George Eliot referred to the ‘propaganda of Wagnerism’). The closest precedent might be Byronism, a similar conflation of radical politics, sex and celebrity that overwhelmed existing artistic divisions. By the late 1800s, Wagnerism had become a pervasive ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”