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“... landscape painters have chosen subjects close to home. Those who decided to go East – like David Roberts and Edward Lear – tend to be of the second rank. Writers, too, grow strong on a diet of familiar material. Harems of the Mind is mostly an account of talent betrayed by ignorance into shallowness or excess; only a few spirits were strong enough to ...”

“... and it is left behind … He was gone, like a meteor, almost as soon as he appeared. Peter Campbell described Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway of 1844 as an exercise in ‘the poetry of speed’ (LRB, 3 June 2004). Rookwood was written a decade earlier. The Great Western was yet to be built; work on the London and ...”

“... end pick up the pieces. And it will. Downing Street’s first-choice strategy for the outing of David Kelly – writing, semi-publicly, to the Intelligence and Security Committee to offer him as a witness – was vetoed by Ann Taylor MP, the Committee’s chairman, whose staff refused to be sent the suggested letter. In her testimony to the Inquiry, Taylor ...”

“... compulsive polemical approach to events and to their obsession with the Soviet threat.’ Duncan Campbell’s purpose is to expose and document the evolution of the British Government’s plans for civil defence. He has been at work for years taking the lid off those aspects of defence and intelligence where the Government uses secrecy to keep us ignorant of ...”

“... another lodging. I really think the whole world is gone mad ... In the park I had a glimpse of a Campbell but I was loaded with Oranges and could not stop which I afterwards repented of.’ A Campbell was the codeword for one of the Blues; and the reason Leeves was thrown out of his lodgings was that his landlord objected ...”

“... something much deeper and blacker, that we all respected’. In an obituary of the sculptor David Smith he describes the good times they had and adds: ‘we both knew damned well the black abyss in each of us that the sun and the daughters’ skin and the bounty and the drink could alleviate but not begin to fill, a certain kind, I suppose of ...”

“... When the Paisiello portrait was exhibited in the Salon of 1791 it won extravagant praise from David, who thought a man could not have done better. The Queen of Naples herself insisted on a portrait. ‘This princess of whom so much ill has been spoken and written, was affectionate by nature and very simple in her private life; her generosity was truly ...”

“... All in all, I get the feeling that TV overrates its audience’s blood-lust, or squirmlust. Take David Dimbleby’s grilling of Tony Blair on Panorama. Most of the interview was spent raking over Blair’s Old Labour past. At first this line seemed fair enough. Blair, after all, had on that very day been assuring his new City chums that almost nothing the ...”

“... solutions. These may have few advantages: the re-design of the Guardian by a typographer (David Hillman) has resulted in a gawkier paper than the one the suave types at the Independent produce. Printing has produced most of its own best historians – Blades, Morison, Updike. Perhaps it is a sign of the growing division between reading and designing ...”

“... In its own small sphere, the destruction by Express Newspapers of the Beaverbrook Library must rank as one of the worst acts of intellectual vandalism in recent years. No one who had the privilege of working there during its brief existence in the late Sixties and early Seventies will ever forget it. There, instantly accessible in their sliding metal racks, were the Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Beaverbrook and other papers; on a quiet day, when one was trusted, one could actually get out one’s own files ...”

“... art can make and the support it can give to bad government are evident in Bell’s treatment of David (‘this cheerleader-cum-weathervane’) and the Death of Marat. He tracks its ‘terse, glare-lit, blocked-off pictorial space’ back to Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and the genre, the martyr-portrait, to religious art: ‘...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... in modern eyes may lie in perceptual as well as in cultural embarrassment. A laconic note from David Hockney prefaces Paul Joyce’s conversations with him. It ends: ‘My photographer friends said it wasn’t really photography but painting. I’m not so sure, but I think that’s where I’d like to leave it.’ Whether it is ‘it’ the work or ...”

“... Behind every great man is a great spin-doctor. Tony Blair has gorgeous pouting Alistair Campbell, exhack, ex-alcoholic, ex-pornographer, all-round thug and family-values man. What a guy! William Hague meanwhile is not a great man and behind him is Sebastian Coe. Lately, however, he has employed the services of another gorgeous ex-hack, Amanda Platell, fun-loving Aussie, the femme fatale of the Mirror Group, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, and now would-be novelist ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”