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“... it dealt a ‘decisive blow … to the unhurried “gentlemanly” style of business’, as Edmund de Rothschild put it. Warburg himself later claimed that he disliked the whole episode and would have preferred a friendly deal. But there can be no doubt that the rapid increase of the bank’s business dated from the moment he showed he was able to take on the ...”

“... that guides the artist, then, is not the vain quest for a proper apparel for the soul [une parure de l’âme], it is the métier itself, insisting on goodness, or rather, bringing goodness in its wake.’ clar05_3623 Gallery These are difficult sentences, and my translation works hard (too hard) to make them easier, but their terms came back to me ...”

“... practitioners’. His second aim was to relate Renaissance ideas about architecture to ideas about man, nature and Classical Antiquity, more especially ideas about the mathematical structure of the universe and the analogy between musical and architectural harmony and proportions. Narrower in focus than Pevsner, Wittkower achieved a sharper definition of his ...”

“... Paul Celan​ was born in 1920 and died in 1970. The symmetry of these dates, arranged around the end of the Second World War, seems cruelly freighted, as does the fact that Celan chose to end his life on Hitler’s birthday. Celan – he gave himself the name by inverting the order of the syllables of his original surname, Antschel – grew up in Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now part of Ukraine ...”

“... which is a bit rich, since one might just as easily describe Betjeman as a silly little man with a taste for posh totty; though one wouldn’t, of course. The terms Hillier chooses to describe Betjeman’s relationships are nice little phrases like ‘smitten’, or ‘fell in love with’, which is all very fine and noble – admirable even ...”

“... as a bona fide Surrealist. His second book of poems, published in 1936, was modishly entitled Man’s Life Is This Meat and demonstrated a concerted English attempt to dally in the magnetic Elysian fields of Surrealist art. It included poems to Dali and Tanguy, ‘Charity Week’ inspired by Ernst’s collages in Une Semaine ...”

“... say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic writer, and I about a man whose best subject was work: shovelling coal, pulping paper, waiting tables, tooting horns, palming basketballs, driving Formula One cars (because music and sport are also work, and he admired everything done with effort and skill). To both of us he was ...”

“... the scholars behind the show want to emphasise. The lead in the catalogue is taken by Ernst van de Wetering, the present head of the Rembrandt Research Project in Holland that has been investigating the master’s oeuvre since 1968. He and his fellow contributors are concerned to sponge away from the self-portraiture the biographical varnish clinging to it ...”

“... Delicately, like a surgeon baring a pus-filled appendix, the man behind the counter slices a catering-size salami. His customer feeds a sandwich into her mouth, careful not to smudge the lipstick. Dolled up to the nines and facing professional competition from the pair of high-heeled legs just visible through the street door, she averts her eyes and readies herself for the first bite ...”

“... one black, one grey, one blue – and six copies of a volume of poems by Champerret, Chants de la Dordogne, published in 1941 by a small press in Perigueux, Editions du Noir (presumably a reference to Perigord Noir, the region south of Perigueux, which takes its name from the black oaks that grow there). The poems were written in rhyming ...”

“... A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had their revenge. Wertham is ...”

“... discussion as to why the world is caught up in a ‘global rush to commemorate atrocities’, as Paul Williams puts it in Memorial Museums (Berg, £19.99). There is no doubting the evidence. A non-exhaustive list at the beginning of the book includes 24 museums, sites or artefacts marking atrocities, disasters and ‘crimes against humanity’, of which only ...”

“... Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up ...”

“... Swift showing himself the master of cultivated and highly-wrought disgust for the female body, and de Sade thrown in for a make-weight. Like the century which follows, it breeds some despicable doggerel, compared to which Pitt-Kethley’s version of ‘Eskimo Nell’ is a marvel of freshness and rhymer’s ingenuity. The 19th century is the century of ‘bawdy ...”

“... know what to expect from a book called The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, by Geoffrey de Ste Croix, whose career as an ancient historian began after the war when he was a mature student at University College, London under the great A. H. M. Jones. Jones’s Athenian Democracy (1960) remains the best analysis (and defence) of that historic ...”