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“... sold £459 million worth of postwar and contemporary art in the first half of last year. In May, Sotheby’s in New York more than doubled the record price for a contemporary work when it sold Rothko’s White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $72.8 million; the following night, at Christie’s, Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car ...”

“... and in London, describes Boxer in his autobiography as ‘both Figaro and the Count’, which may suggest not a blend of patrician wilfulness and backstairs cunning but internal strife between the two. Presumably you had to know him well to get an inkling of that. More obviously he was handsome, dandyish, an upper-class socialist. He liked cricket, bridge ...”

“... Prospero threatens Caliban in The Tempest: ‘Urchins shall, for that vast of night that they may work, all exercise on thee.’ The sea urchin, then, takes its name from the hedgehog. Throughout history we have turned to the hedgehog: we have used them in our fables, and demanded that they cure us of our pains. In 1693 the physician William Salmon ...”

“... settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters ...”

“... assassination (‘A Nation Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the Tories’ ‘New Caring Face’ in 1986, and his prince-of-darkness bubble: ‘I can’t speak to you now. The sun’s coming up.’ But if a long-lost favourite is not on view at the exhibition, it can be found ...”

“... Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and doctors (Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloane). But he turned down an offer to be the King’s Painter because he objected to ‘the slavery of court dependence’. His writings on art were read widely (his Essay on the Theory of Painting, published in 1715, was on Delacroix’s ...”

“... Innocent is reported to have said, ‘an inexhaustible well from whose plenty many things may be extorted.’ (Paris went on to note that ‘the London merchants who dealt in these things were not displeased, and sold them at whatever price they chose.’) A detail from the Clare chasuble. In many ways opus anglicanum was not very English at ...”

“... altered as desired, as well as literary texts. The contributions poured in. There was a precedent: Richard Huelsenbeck had intended to publish a similar collection called Dadaco early in 1920. Some trial pages were printed but the project seems to have been abandoned on grounds of cost. The volume was first intended to be entitled Dadako, a term combining art ...”

“... him about being the model for William Boot in Scoop, and he admitted, when I pushed him, that he may indeed have taken a few too many suitcases to Addis Ababa in 1936. ‘Evelyn overdid it,’ he said. ‘Overdoing it was rather his thing.’We sat upstairs under a huge portrait of Disraeli. Thatcher was across from me, wearing a blue, sparkly twinset and a ...”

“... peculiar and transient difficulties of one offshore island at an awkward corner in its history. It may be time for another spin of the wheel in the 1980s, with the revival of doctrines of sound money and good housekeeping under Reagan and Thatcher. Now Keynes has admittedly not been getting any younger in the meantime, so the hypothetical views upon economic ...”

“... in about 1742, and was brought to England in 1750 by his first master, or ‘owner’, Colonel Richard Bathurst. He was probably baptised in England, though no record of this has been found. At Orange River, the sugar plantation where he spent his childhood, he was called Quashey, a very common slave name which he exchanged for a very ordinary-sounding ...”

“... obligation to make allowances at moments like this. But how generous should such allowances be? ‘May 24, 1980’ is a translation from the Russian into rhyming, or assonantally chiming, quatrains. It is conceivable that the word ‘nitty-gritty’ was chosen here, not just as a companion-in-rhyme for ‘city’, but because it is the ideal counterpart to ...”

“... last summer: Vol. 3, No 9.) Sexuality ‘traces that line of foam which shows just how far speech may advance on the sands of silence’. To speak of it, to ourselves, to each other, to those who hire out their ears, is, we think (or Foucault thinks we think), to reach the root of our subjectivity. That is his interest in it. Speaking of sexuality is the ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... Gay has indicated what the nature of the material still being withheld is likely to be, and how it may affect his own conclusions. (Thus one may infer from the evidence hinted at that Freud’s own sex life, which, it had seemed, came to an end when he was not quite 44 years of age, ...”