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“... by which its countryside should be judged. Yet, as Daniels points out, Constable was in fact a painter of London, not just of the Stour Valley in Suffolk. It was Victorian biographers and art critics who focused on his rural canvases in part because they offered an escape from so much of what England had become, industrially advanced, aggressively ...”

“... of my character.’ He was a nightwalker in the tradition of Léon Spilliaert, the Ostend painter; a connoisseur of suburbs and out-of-season resorts where impatient dunes threaten to bury speculative housing. Vaes repeated his established circuits, testing for pavements in which ‘the Elsewhere had taken root’. There were psychogeographical ...”

“... leaping great distances ... overflowing with an abundance of power’. Alexandre Benois, the painter, and one of the new kind of set designers courted by Diaghilev, saw the young Nijinsky as ‘half-cat, half-snake, fiendishly agile, feminine and yet wholly terrifying’. And he tried to capture the new ethos: ‘In the ballet,’ he wrote, ‘I would ...”

“... and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will become precious and mannered. Continue on your way, but ...”

“... Bay Area leftie muckety-mucks (Jerry Brown, Angela Davis and the soon-to-be-assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were others) bedazzled by the ghoulish Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of the San Francisco-based Peoples Temple cult, Elvis-style drug addict, ambisexual pussy-predator, and self-anointed ‘revolutionary ...”

“... on signing himself in letters to his ‘Spanish Woman’ – arranged for the court portrait painter to paint Lola’s picture, and soon developed the habit of kissing it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. He visited her daily at her hotel. And he lavished money on her, while being so mean with his own wife and eight children that they ...”

“... his talents: at the time of joining the GPO Film Unit, he thought of himself primarily as a painter, though he also wrote poetry and literary criticism, designed theatre sets, collected rare books and had begun to compile texts for an ambitious anthology about the machine age and its dehumanising effects, which owed something to his parents’ William ...”

“... an objection that Henry Senior had also registered when William contemplated a career as a painter. James notes with amusement how little his father’s attitude resembled the usual grounds for objecting to the artistic professions; but Henry Senior was nothing if not consistent in his determination to keep all alternatives open, and the only thing ...”

“... a half. Her mother, Anne Powell, came from a decidedly unintellectual background: Anne’s father, George Powell, was a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and briefly a Tory MP, while his wife was the daughter of a brewing family; Anne was a debutante and presented at court in the traditional upper-class way. But then she married the ...”

“... the kind of modern vessel he opposed till the day of his death several decades later.The painter, David Wilkie, had been prescribed foreign travel by his doctor, as a remedy for what sounds like depression. He was a Scotsman who’d risen from poverty and, in the early part of the century, became a great favourite of the establishment (...”

“... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in the ...”

“... people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We want George,’ ‘We want Liz.’ I don’t believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not ...”

“... first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his ...”

“... cast into the political wilderness by the time the decade was over; two – Donogh O’Malley and George Colley – would die suddenly (there was no such sudden death among the old guard); one – Brian Lenihan – would be fired in disgrace; another, now dead, would end up sodden with drink in the European Parliament; and then there was Haughey. The ...”

“... grovel and it makes people lie. Politicians long ago realised the uses of royal circuses: Lloyd George devised a wholly bogus Investiture Ceremony for the Prince of Wales at a time when the Irish were getting out of hand, and Harold Wilson did the same in the late Sixties when Welsh and Celtic nationalism was again on the rise. Despite an enormous media ...”