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“... or less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ...”

“... snail’ (Januszczak, again). Among the recently deceased, no artist is more piously revered than Joseph Beuys, who, for his first commercial gallery exhibition, as Andrew Brighton recalls, ‘smeared his head with honey and gold, tied to his right shoe an iron sole as a companion to the felt sole of his left and took into his arms a dead hare to which he ...”

“... The mystery grows: what do women find to enjoy in Don Giovanni, ‘Mozart’s unpleasant opera’ (Joseph Kerman)? Presumably they go ‘not for the doctrine, but the music there’. In view of Lipking’s play with the word ‘abandoned’ – it can signify ‘to’ as well as ‘by’ – and his equally ambiguous comment, ‘the woman forgets herself, the ...”

“... time in which, as everyone knows, the fine arts emerged from their tombs’. And in 1745 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville defended his decision to exclude all early painters from his Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, a work soon translated into English and German, by pointing out that ‘Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino … have no ...”

“... is an unforgettable book. The first edition, published by Cape in 1992 and reviewed in the LRB by John Bayley (23 July 1992), was handsome; on its front cover is a photo by Leni Riefenstahl of a diver holding a swallow pose, her head about to plunge through the surface of the water. The pictures inside include one by Lartigue of a swimmer sitting on the sand ...”

“... along a row of windows that compromise his distinctive effect of coloured space. Stacks of felt by Joseph Beuys and installation pieces in dirt, gravel, mirror and glass by Robert Smithson are tucked away in corners. These dead artists are not treated as well as the living. Warhol is the exception: his Shadows (1978), 72 paintings of the same gloomy image in ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and ...”

“... Peter Chamberlen’s The Poore Mans Advocate (1649), Peter Cornelius Plockhoy (1659), John Bellers’s Proposals for Raising a College of Industry (1695), and two essays by an anonymous Hermeticist, Philadept, published in 1698 and 1700. Many in this last group were discussed in 1952 by J.K. Fuz in a pioneering work, Welfare Economics in English ...”

“... family knelt to say the Rosary in the evening, and if you wanted to pass an exam you prayed to St Joseph of Cupertino. The only moments of relief from utter boredom were when young Colm’s father appeared to be shaking with uncontrollable laughter as the beads passed through his hands, and had to leave the room. Religious solemnity has a unique power to ...”

“... Williams), only two (named) amateurs have been deemed worthy of representation in the show: John White Abbott, the remarkably faithful imitator of his teacher Francis Towne, and the Reverend William Gilpin, who merits such exceptional treatment solely on account of his work as a leading theorist of the picturesque (in fact, Gilpin didn’t produce ...”

“... the form of a ‘patent portable water closet’ convertible into a ‘floating life-preserver’. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the first great prefabricated building and the ‘largest enclosed space on earth’, was assembled in four months. There was never a question of building a vast revolutionary structure and then wondering what to put in ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”

“... Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey isn’t clear. One hopes Anne didn’t do to it what Samuel Pepys did to his pet monkey in ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... good behaviour and taste are critical because everyone knows where the Guggenheims came from. ‘Joseph and Meyer, these were my grandfathers, and both men were peddlers, peasants, despised,’ Peggy explains. As young men in Ohio and Pennsylvania they bought and sold what they could (‘shoehorns, spectacles’), eventually amassing enough capital to go ...”