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“... with, as in Edward Young’s ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’ of 1759, which had a strong echo in Germany. Henceforward the term ‘A Roman Copy’ was tantamount to a condemnation. In a sense, it demonstrates the strength of the ‘canon’ that the critical spoilsports were so slow in moving in. There had been rumblings before, but it was not before ...”

“... Sir Ernst Gombrich here collects various memorial lectures and memoirs of distinguished colleagues. He is a lecturer of high accomplishment – indeed I doubt if he has any serious rival in the shaping and illustration of an argument. Normally he uses not one but two magic lanterns. Some years ago he gave the Romanes Lecture and was denied the use of even one, but this did not deter him, for he simply used the interior of the Sheldonian as an image source, and voyaged on, with Karl Popper, as usual, his pole star, into very difficult waters: the relations of synchronic and diachronic in art history, the problems of canonicity and value ...”

“... Sir Ernst Gombrich is not only one of the very few historians of art now alive whose ideas have aroused wide interest outside his immediate discipline, but he is also an astonnishingly skilful lecturer. It is therefore only appropriate that he should so often have been invited to give those formal university lectures devoted to the discussion of general cultural issues ...”

“... as tapestry-like decorations over a background which fails to recede.One may doubt whether E.H. Gombrich, who died on 3 November, ever passionately liked, or was even very curious about, individual paintings, except in so far as they could illustrate the deeper matters on which he was so illuminating, in particular what goes on when people make marks which ...”

“... project, announcing at one point that he had nearly given up after receiving a letter from E.H. Gombrich. This letter, in a slightly abridged form, comprises the ninth segment of correspondence reproduced in the appendix. Gombrich, it appears, never wept in front of a painting and ‘hardly ever laughed’, in spite of ...”

“... for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the strength of our emotional response to Rembrandt lead us into conceptual anachronisms? Did ‘the ...”

“... symphony of French horns. It is shared by many literary historians themselves. As E.H. Gombrich put it, there is no innocent eye. Or, there is no transparent method or object of study. The very word ‘history’ is not simple. For although it is founded on a realist presumption, it designates not one thing but several. ‘History’ is primal ...”

“... of all the best brains on technology’. There are two splendid lectures in the volume, from E.H. Gombrich and the late H.D.F. Kitto. Kitto discusses Sophocles in terms of Arnold’s line: ‘He saw life steadily and saw it whole.’ Gombrich explores in a sparkling way the analogy between evolutionary processes in which ...”

“... Like Titian’s, Cartier-Bresson’s work began as the mirror of one epoch and is ending as that of another, simply because he invented the best mirror and kept polishing it Cartier-Bresson’s influence has been immense since his beginnings, not just on photography but on cinema and photojournalism, so that he has been largely responsible for 20th-century notions of what a superior realistic camera image should look like ...”

“... a literature of its own. Since then generations of German schoolchildren have been taught, as E.H. Gombrich once put it, to see Lessing as a ‘Moses who led his people out of French servitude towards the promised land of Deutsche Klassik’. The ‘father of German literature’ was inevitably conscripted into Goebbels’s fantasy of Germany as ‘the ...”

“... it can even be uncanny, with a touch of Hogwarts about it. Where else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ...”

“... were detailed and elaborate, even advancing a cyclic view of stylistic development. The echo of Riegl is in the isolation of a ‘root of style’ independent of cultural determination, arising exclusively from a visual tradition in painting. Podro offers some powerful criticisms of Wölffin’s theory of an autonomous visual tradition and the idea ...”