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“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’...”

“... In February 1940, a Reynolds News reviewer wrote of the three Sitwells, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell: ‘Now oblivion has claimed them, and they are remembered with a kindly if slightly cynical smile.’ And this, I suppose, is more or less how they are thought of now. Edith’s dark vowels still find their way into anthologies ...”

“... David Mitchell’s new novel is set on and around an artificial island called Dejima, constructed in the bay of Nagasaki to house representatives of the Vereenigde Oest-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), the sole official conduit for European trade with Japan during almost all of the rule of the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603-1867 ...”

“... to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them. Alas, few people wrote to him. Worse, most of his correspondents were obscure and insignificant. Between the letter from Henry ...”

“... Hackney, shortly before midnight on 11 February 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and ...”

“... a child, ‘but Mama remained ’till six in the morning’ – which presumably curtailed Mama’s devotions that day. She effectively taught her children to gamble. ‘I can never make myself easy,’ she later wrote to Georgiana, ‘about the bad example I have set you, and what you have but too faithfully imitated.’ Her daughters had indeed inherited ...”

“... Times proclaimed to a sceptical public that he was Donald Beves, the delightful tutor of King’s known to generations of undergraduates who performed on stage in the ADC, the Marlowe or the Musical Society, and whose interest in politics or indeed in ideas was negligible: clearly his bonhomie disguised an Iago. When that identification proved too ...”

“... The engraving​ called A Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s shows nine men seated around a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith ...”

“... In​ 1807, Angelica Kauffman’s body was carried in state to her funeral at the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome. A small army of priests, artists and dignitaries accompanied the coffin. Above the mourners, amid a sea of candles, two of her paintings were carried aloft in triumphal procession – a theatrical touch that echoed another funeral three centuries earlier, when Rome mourned the death of the ‘divine Raphael ...”

“... David Peterley’s Peterley Harvest was first published on 24 October 1960. The book had a curious history and, shortly before publication, stories began to appear in the press declaring it to be an elaborate hoax. The jacket of the book contained the information that David Peterley was the only son of an old Quaker family that had ‘lived in the Chilterns and been neighbours of Milton and the Penns ...”

“... pictures he painted, which are the most highly regarded, through whose hands they have passed, and so on. In all this I see nothing of more than mediocre intelligence, and I suspect there exists some degree of servility in this enthusiasm. Dare I say what I think of this debauchery and corrupt curiosité? One must somehow enjoy a swindle ...”

“... is a magisterial study of a great popular artist: a full-scale interpretation of James Gillray’s output of satirical prints, and a biography that warrants comparison with the best ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care ...”

“... from the shock of the 1848 Revolutions, Carlyle was alarmed that the workers weren’t quite so silent after all. ‘Stump oratory’ had taken over, he observed in his Latter-Day Pamphlets: ‘tongues, platforms, parliaments, and fourth-estates; unfettered presses, periodical and stationary literatures: we are nearly all gone to tongue.’ Carlyle was ...”

“... of what seems to have been a much happier experience of language. Between tales from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, and glugs of Koskenkorva vodka, Pastor Koskela, a Lutheran and a nationalist, boasts of the spontaneity of the Finnish tongue: ‘The sounds of our language were around us, in nature, in the woods, in the pull of the sea, in the ...”