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“... as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close friend. ‘Which hand am I, Mr President?’ Morgenthau asked. ‘My right hand,’ he replied, ‘but I keep my left hand under the table.’ Roosevelt’s presidency is superbly documented, yet the modern ...”

“... to see themselves as the heirs of Moore, Piper, Sutherland, Nicholson and Hepworth, let alone of Reynolds, Constable or Turner? And yet we wonder why our national tradition appears so enervated.’ Reynolds, Constable and Turner were all passionately patriotic and the first two were capable of the most crass disparagement ...”

“... Laud, men who had risen to power, show expressions closer to those of Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s functionaries. Laud (the son of a Reading cloth merchant and, like the king, a short man) looks at the painter with raised eyebrows – maybe he will be glad when the session is over. In a double portrait, Wentworth appears determined; his ...”

“... army at fourteen, giving a false name and age, and served in Ireland. In 1890 he married Lillie Reynolds, a domestic servant from a Protestant family in Co. Wicklow, and the pair returned to Edinburgh, where Connolly worked as a manure carter, as his father had done. Until the 1890s he was a practising Catholic, but abandoned his faith around the time he ...”

“... by Holbein reproduced nearby. We learn from one of the unusually informative captions that King Henry VIII was taken with the idea of making Christina, a teenage widow, his fourth wife. He dispatched Holbein, his court painter, to Brussels to record her likeness. She sat to Holbein between 1 and 4 p.m. on 12 March 1538. The artist left Brussels that night ...”

“... 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to ...”

“... himself from the funeral, ‘very little regretted even by his nearest acquaintance’, or as Henry Fielding put it more bluntly, ‘pissed upon with scorn and contempt’. Foote’s celebrity status can be measured in the proliferation of theatrical prints and paintings of him onstage, working the audience with his idiosyncratic blend of goofy humour and ...”

“... the most sympathetic and beautiful portraits of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster ...”

“... those of the new French heroes Mirabeau and Dumouriez. He had met his fellow Irish republicans, Henry Sheares and Wolfe Tone, and gained Girondin support for a French expeditionary force to land in Ireland. A more attractive personality than Shelley, he had the same high-born energy and idealism. And he had them a generation earlier, when history seemed at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... religious, metaphysical and postitivist: this was adopted by empiricists such as Grote and George Henry Lewes. The fourth method was derived from Hegel, whose influence began to be felt during the 1840s. His account of how the Greeks developed from Sittlichkeit, respect for custom and tradition, to Moralität seemed to many Victorians relevant to their own ...”

“... whips were expected to acquire shareholdings in newspapers. Lloyd George’s Liberals invested in Reynolds’ News; other Liberals funded the Westminster Gazette; the Conservative Party helped to pay for the Manchester Courier and the Daily Express. The Tory whips offered the Observer £1000 in 1910 to produce a special edition they could hawk around the ...”

“... straight through can pick up what happened ante for himself (who is going to forget the death of Henry Thrale?), while the reader who is trying to look something up will be helped just as much by a sufficient index. There is much more that we would wish to know than is offered by the notes. For instance, in Volume I the only note on John Taylor, Johnson’s ...”

“... Hester Salusbury married first the wealthy brewer, MP, womaniser and ‘Southwark macaroni’ Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, only four of whom survived, and then the Italian music master Gabriel Piozzi, for whom she pined passionately at the ripe old age of 40, and scandalised her circle by not only marrying but happily introducing him into ...”

“... of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of the business side of building and on whose book-keeping methods he probably modelled his own. He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools at 18 and du Prey gives a lively picture of the Academy at this time, when ...”