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“... born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the blues, Melly, not quoted here, was in a good position to assess a particular Liverpudlian trait: that of ...”

“... her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the ...”

“... on TV. I can remember a time when ursine influencers were reliably geezerish, like Hofmeister’s George in his pork-pie hat and yellow satin jacket (‘For a great lager, follow the bear’). But cuddliness resumed in the 1990s, in successive Coca-Cola Christmas campaigns, and hasn’t let up since. Bears distribute their weight towards their hind legs, and ...”

“... to the exercise of compassion). The need for sympathy in human relations had been central to George Eliot’s intensely moral interpretation of what art can do for us: ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies,’ she wrote in her 1856 essay on ...”

“... immigrants and regularly held political meetings. At one of them Meir met Morris Myerson, a sign painter who gave her long lists of books to read, and whom she eventually married. She returned to Milwaukee at her father’s insistence, but the exposure to new ideas and debates about Zionism, socialism and territorialism had filled her with enthusiasm. She ...”

“... their son unnamed in order to spare the child ridicule. (‘You can’t mess up ———.’) The painter in So Much Blue (2017) has spoken the title of his long-gestating work-in-progress just once ‘under my breath while I was alone in my studio’ and fears that his children ‘might try to name it and so ruin it and everything’.There are various ways ...”

“... his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped ...”

“... them, are wholly poetic or rhetorical – that is to say, linguistic; they owe nothing to the painter’s nice distinctions between the pigments on his palette, nor to a naturalist’s knowledge of just how a swift differs from a swallow. Grigson’s views on the proper language for poetry would, on the other hand, make the poet subservient to both the ...”

“... hands for £1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be dismissed by Mrs Bottomley as just another ancillary worker bleeding (sic) the Health Service dry.18 July. Lord (ex-Chief Rabbi) Jakobovits is in favour of genetic engineering to rid the world of homosexuality. I wonder ...”

“... of the opening. We are told of her mother’s death, of the break-up of her marriage to the poet George MacBeth, of the obsessively repeated train-journeys in Italy with her infant son which were her way of fending off (or having) a nervous breakdown, and of her incipient relationship with the painter Robbie Scott-Duff ...”

“... personifications on the skylines of buildings, which reached a climax in the quadrigas by George Récepon which burst with exhilarating absurdity from the roof of the Grand Palais in 1900. This type of sculpture was made possible by welding sheets of copper over an armature – essentially the same technique that Mukhina used. The Winged Victory was ...”

“... in politics rather than literature: he had an obsession, for instance, with the theories of Henry George. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Douglas as anything other than an artist. At the risk of over-simplification, one might describe Hillary as a man of action endowed with a journalistic facility, and Douglas as an artist with a taste for ...”

“... little, after 1688, the arts relied on royal patronage, and how much on commercial exploitation. George II mattered less than Tyres did. In one of many entertaining vignettes, Brewer describes the attempts to celebrate the ending of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1749 and the British monarchy’s ‘inability or unwillingness to use the arts ...”

“... If a 19th-century paternity exists for this novel, it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that that beguiling property – so eminently characteristic of Meredith – of seeming to slide more or less ...”

“... he reports a conversation on the subject which took place some years earlier between a ‘foreign painter’ and Fromentin, the historian of Dutch art. Modernism in theology had, however, already been denounced by another Dutchman, the Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, who, in 1871, published a book entitled Het Modernisme: Een Fata Morgana op Christelijk Gebied ...”