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“... a mini-parliament, with its members divided into the three estates of apprentices, journeymen and masters, masons saw their movement as the champion of enlightened conduct: fraternity, benevolence, conviviality and, above all, English liberty. The ‘Royal Art’, so its Constitutions proclaimed, had been practised by the ‘free born ... from the beginning ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”

“... in 1878, but fled Russia at the time of the Revolution, having studied with a number of esoteric masters in Russia and Asia, most notably with Gurdjieff. One of the earliest results was the treatise Tertium Organum, which Ouspensky first wrote in Russian. A revised version, translated by Claude Bragdon and published in 1921, became a New York ...”

“... of the Barbizon School, whose works were much sought after by Pittsburgh’s smart set – to Old Masters. On one or more trips to Europe in the early 1900s, he visited the Wallace Collection, which had been bequeathed to the nation in 1897 and opened as a public art museum three years later.Frick had the nous to insist that dealers allow him to trade back ...”

“... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of this ...”

“... the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the common law. Newspapers often printed ‘for sale’ or ‘wanted’ advertisements, or asked for runaway slaves to be returned. Second, there were well-connected Africans and their sons living openly in the city. By ...”

“... Maconochie, who arrived in Hobart in 1837 as secretary to a new governor, the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. Like Macquarie, he soon drew attacks from those who wanted no reforms. Scots tended, it would seem, to be either worse than the common run of English functionaries, or far superior. But between the place of Scotsmen and Irishmen in Australia there ...”

“... came of age and could spend his own money he went to the flashiest college in Cambridge, St John’s. He later moved to Trinity Hall, where he complained to his rich uncle that he had ‘runn somewhat deepe into my Tailours debt’. He studied law and acquired expensive friends, many of whom he retained throughout his life. In 1623, aged over thirty, he ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... indeed I have just heard from the clarinettist’s owner, the Los Angeles collector and inventor John Gaughan, that the android’s performance was not quite what it seemed, though it was nonetheless impressive. His instrument was sealed at both ends and air was blown into it not through his mouth but through his thumb. Each of the 32 keys controlled a brass ...”

“... civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation. Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”