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“... 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 ...”

“... of discussion, and there were intermittent episodes of excitement around a Watteau, Greuze or David. When an artist had something revelatory to say, when he found ways to represent previously latent perceptions and structures of feeling, an audience was ready to respond. But in the absence of such exceptional art, the business of painting and sculpture ...”

“... Dunciad.On a smaller scale, he could always do one-off travesties – things like his send-up of Reynolds’s Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces. Gillray’s parody was called La Belle Assemblée. In place of the gracious solitary aristocrat, multiple ladies are muscling into line for the sacrifice; among them, as Loxton puts it, ‘the ...”

“... novelists, Dickens and Thackeray became journalists as well. Bored with running newspapers, G.W.M. Reynolds and Mark Lemon turned their hand to penny dreadfuls and comedies. The deregulation of the London stage in 1843 meant that actors, managers and playwrights competed for ever-growing theatrical audiences. And the great schism in the Scottish churches, the ...”

“... makes the point. The book’s plot is a more routine contraption, bolting together elements of David Lodge and Henning Mankell. Ivan has been brought to Helsinki by Olga Pavlovna, a Russian linguist who wants to display him at a conference to prove her theory of the hybridity and geographical dispersion of the Finno-Ugric languages. Somewhat ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual. He made no preliminary drawings; when it came to finishing the figure a stand-in could take up the chosen position, usually a variation on a settled range of elegantly relaxed poses. Batoni, who was not cheap, was inclined to work ...”

“... often described as a ‘coquette’: there was much speculation about her relationship with Joshua Reynolds, and Marat later claimed to have seduced her in London. There was no substance to most of it, but Kauffman knew the risks she ran. When lovely woman stooped to folly, the consequences usually depended on how far up the social scale she had ...”

“... whose paintings would not have surprised, although they would have delighted, Veronese, Rubens or Reynolds. Delaroche’s picture presents Robert Rosenblum with ‘the immediate illusion of a theatrical tableau enacted by costumed players in a crystal-clear space’. It was painted for – one might say took place at – the Salon of 1834. By then many ...”

“... flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. But the pleasures of scholarship are not wholly coextensive with those of reading. Students are probably still encouraged to enjoy the measured venom of the satires. But where to go beyond that? Paul ...”

“... and family life, on which the settlement’s ‘blueprint for growth’ was premised. By contrast, David Neal’s monograph opens with a successful legal action brought by a convict couple against one of the First Fleet captains. Neal is concerned to show how the establishment of the rule of law in a penal colony, at once a tautology and an oxymoron, created ...”

“... colleagues. They were horrified by the progress of philosophical scepticism, exemplified by David Hume, which they saw as corroding the foundations of Christian faith. Reid, in An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense of 1764, argued in response that ‘there are certain principles … which the constitution of our nature leads ...”

“... genius. The definition of genius is implicit in the platitude about its affinity to madness. Reynolds sought to deflate this dramatic notion with down-to-earth talk of an infinite capacity for taking pains. But surely that capacity is more relevant to greatness than specifically to genius; when it accompanies genius that is probably because genius breeds ...”

“... to stay instead of returning to America. But artists did not go to Italy only to study what Reynolds called ‘the greatest works of art the world has produced’ – that is to say, the most famous antique statues and the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. Most of them hoped to obtain commissions from their rich compatriots, whom they might meet ...”

“... for their work and achieving a higher status for themselves. The interwoven stories of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s career and of the founding of the Royal Academy are designed to tell us of the new power of (some) painters, and the new availability of art. Often at his best when dealing with the questions of cash that too many historians of art and literature ...”