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“... a solitary beach hut by a seawall (not at the RA), foreshadows the bare paintings of the Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison. Tree behind a Wall, from 1936, could be a George Shaw. But Spilliaert is best seen in his own time, in the moody coastal gloom of Ostend, and the shadowy rooms of his ...”

“... 20th century has little to do with a battle in the studio between man, paint and canvas – the painter as hero was becoming the artist as ironist.Lichtenstein’s change of direction was of the kind which creates the illusion that art has a goal – or at least suggests that style change follows patterns. That one force draws style towards classic ...”

“... to me too. To love Rubens is to accept that he fails where other great painters succeed. No painter can do everything. But the source of Rubens’s failures may also be the source of his unparalleled energy, charm and inventiveness.Take the way he paints Jesus’ dead body as it is taken down from the cross. His greatest version of this subject is in ...”

“... become, like sport, a specialised affair, and Burgess himself is taken seriously along with it. George Walden, chairman of this year’s Booker Prize, quoted Burgess as a contemporary sage, whose dictum on what a good novel should be like was given as a guideline to his judging panel. Such a novel should leave in the mind ‘a sort of philosophical ...”

“... to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style’), it made him realise ‘the English richness of George Eliot’ and ‘the superiority of English culture and the English mind to the French’. In this he was expressing New England’s special sense of the English as well as of the French. He moved to London at the end of 1876, and installed himself at once ...”

“... of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much ...”

“... actionable on all counts: at a time of intense alarm around the first Jacobite Rising, it compared George I to Nero, threatened his destruction and called for the reinstatement of the ‘real’ royal line across the water. ‘Let us in Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile ...”

“... possibly therapeutic bed. Observers on each side – one suited, one nude (both Bacon’s lover George Dyer) – keep company with animalistic figures. Others were just-for-the-sake-of-it nudes, such as Gabrielle avec la chemise ouverte, one of Renoir’s ‘problem nudes’, which shows Gabrielle Renard, his wife’s cousin and the family nanny, with her ...”

“... on (for example) those repetitious heads with both eyes on the same side? It’s as though the painter has said: ‘I’m going to give you a version of “reality”, but in such a way that you will never be able to pass effortlessly through the medium of paint into a world you know already. I will continually interrupt your recognitions and make you ...”

“... up a small annual pension to a widow in Shropshire; parishes that were more pressed – like St George the Martyr in Southwark, which included several debtors’ prisons with their collateral burdens of wives and children lodging nearby – had to weigh up their choices: they could give casual relief, or insist that claimants return to their home parish ...”

“... explained by a visit Yeats’s last lover, Edith Shackleton, made to Roquebrune accompanied by the painter Gluck, in the summer of 1947. This is what Gluck’s biographer, Diana Souhami, reports: the two women, having searched in vain for Yeats’s grave, questioned the local priest, Abbé Biancheri, and Pierre Reynault, director of Maison Roblot, a firm of ...”

“... Big guns (J. B. Priestley, G. Wilson Knight, George Steiner, Angus Wilson) have been booming the name of John Cowper Powys for many years, outraged that other big guns will not join the salute. In the first number of the Powys Review, in 1977, George Steiner blamed Dr Leavis for praising Theodore Francis Powys above John Cowper, thus denying J ...”

“... which was a dominating feature during the war. Now this, too, has vanished from existence. George Orwell was a recruit for it. I never thought much of Orwell, who has, I think, faded away again now that we have got safely through 1984, or nearly so. Maclaren-Ross has a special interest for me. He haunted the public houses of Soho just when I did the ...”

“... the likelihood of floods). He didn’t get away with it. Sixty years ago, Kenneth Haworth removed George Gilbert Scott’s reredos and transparent iron screen from the chancel. He did get away with it. Pevsner wrote that it was ‘a crime against the tenets of the Victorian Society but the need of the 13th-century cathedral was indeed greater than ...”

“... very least curious about his methods. One of the ‘Generation of Giants’ that gave its name to George Dunne’s classic study of the first Jesuit missionaries in China, Ricci remains a figure of enduring fascination both in China and in Europe, often used as a model of how mutual respect can be shown between intellectuals from different cultures. Ricci is ...”