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“... not as a straw man but as a model; many of the essays in Norm and Form and New Light on Old Masters offer splendid examples of the sort of analysis that Primavera still needs. Above all, it would enable everyone to remember more clearly that Warburg himself set out to explain not a story or a theory but a pictorial convention. Dempsey, for all his deep ...”

“... drawings and prints. Stewart describes their print shops, which clustered near the Piazza Navona. Masters and journeymen covered the major Roman sites in series after series of images. In their work, ‘what might have been background – the ruined architectural forms – becomes both foreground and an object of attention to the figures within the ...”

“... less, at their learned advisers, who could explicate his impressive but demanding writing to their masters and mistresses.Sometimes Alberti may have deliberately tweaked the noses of the ancients whom he admired so much. As Arielle Saiber and others have shown, scripts fascinated him at least as much as print. He examined ancient Roman inscriptions with great ...”

“... he hated the public school he was sent to: King’s Canterbury. The most odious of the masters, Mr Campbell – famed for making boys erase their mistakes by rubbing their noses across the blackboard – was later portrayed as the hateful Mr Gordon in Of Human Bondage. It wasn’t all bad, however. Quite soon, Maugham was spotted by the new ...”

“... that Charles will soldier on magnificently, but only if he shows Camilla the door. Conversely, Anthony Holden and A.N. Wilson want him to step down, but disagree over who should replace him. And Dennis Friedman puts the whole Windsor mess down to bad parenting, and believes that if only future royal mums stayed at home ‘the fatal flaw which appears to ...”

“... incunabula and rare folios, immaculately printed on large paper, bound by Jean Grolier and other masters of the book arts. They preferred unique items, though they often had to settle for the very rare.Lamb had loved his books, and the hunt for them, as much as any of those grandees. In his informal, allusive, often nostalgic Essays and Last Essays of ...”

“... to expect the state and the university to shower on them. He found the Russian, French and Spanish masters for himself, and as a novelist and story writer worked his own way into them, as into every other conceivable literary corner. Hazlitt – somewhat ironically, the darling of radicals who would dismiss the essay genre in general – was an ignoramus ...”

“... KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles of his wasted time in the farce of paying agents in Lorenço Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ...”

“... to have had his heart in the cause for which, eventually, he suffered. What interested his foreign masters was his closeness to the Palace, where he looked after the pictures. He had chats with the King, whom he liked, knew his wife well enough to despise her, and even carried out a secret postwar royal mission to Bavaria. ‘Your value for us,’ said his ...”

“... left out. They have to make up a whole story he didn’t write, and this is very well done by Anthony Veiller for the Siodmak movie, with uncredited help from John Huston and Richard Brooks. The Siegel film, written by Gene Coon, borrows the plot from the first but transposes scenes and careers: New Jersey, Philadelphia and boxing become Miami, California ...”

“... nature.’ Indeed. To add a little intellectual ballast to its story the Sun quoted Professor Anthony Glees, who expressed astonishment at Corbyn’s naivety. Glees, described as an expert on the Cold War, was said to be connected with an outfit called the Oxford Intelligence Group. In fact, he is employed by the University of Buckingham. The next day, 16 ...”

“... of architecture – as in Brunelleschi to Palladio, say – is not strongly marked here. By great masters hardly at all: of course, there are distinguished recurring names – dry Elias Holl in Augsburg with his astonishing taste for disproportion, smooth Italo-Netherlandish Sustris in Bavaria, subtle Cord Tönnis of the quiet Scots-looking houses in and ...”

“... political broadcasts (begun in 1951) and the odd ministerial broadcast of the kind pioneered by Anthony Eden. Mr Cockerell’s treatment of his subject is strictly chronological. He starts with Earliest Times and finishes at the Present Day. Well, not quite the present, for the closing chapter takes us only to the last General Election. Earliest times in ...”

“... the only other lengthy attempt by an English novelist to handle part of World War Two as a theme. (Anthony Powell’s three relevant volumes in The Music of Time are too closely woven into the rest of the series to be considered.) The characteristic English novel of the past half-century has been marked, not only by realism rather than fantasy, but also by the ...”

“... narrator-hero Casaubon reflects at the end, as he awaits probable liquidation at the hands of the Masters of the Hollow World, that ‘the certainty is that there is nothing to understand.’ ‘I understood the Kingdom and was one with it,’ he continues, eating a peach and contemplating the vines where once the dinosaurs wandered about. ‘The rest is only ...”