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“... Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Thus when she was proposed for membership of the French Academy, it was natural that some Frenchmen would make an issue of her nationality, in order to prevent a woman joining their club ...”

“... portraits of elegantly dressed women. The book is based on an exhibition held this summer at the Frick in New York. Frick loved portraits – his wonderful collection includes work by Holbein, Rembrandt and Van Dyck – and he bought four of Whistler’s when they came on the market after the artist’s death. There ...”

“... when least characteristic. There are two outstanding examples. The first, on the Pilgrimage of Grace, shows Elton as the master political historian, a guise that he assumes too rarely. It argues slashingly against Scarisbrick’s view of the Pilgrimage as an authentic movement of popular protest and sees it instead as planned and led from above, while its ...”

“... personally. Reginald Pole called him a Machiavel, and the label, seemingly congruent with the Frick Collection’s famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, has stuck: Cromwell’s intensely focused stillness suggests a man it would be unwise to cross. Even for those who lionised him as a champion of the English Reformation, there were bits of his life ...”

“... an appropriately monastic day out, going first via Northallerton (a place to be avoided) to Mount Grace, which I had thought a remote spot but which is within sight and sound of the busy A19 to Teeside. Envy the nice life a Carthusian monk must have had in the early 15th century: meals brought to the door, sitting-room, study and bedroom looking out on a ...”

“... narrow sash windows with small square panes, was ‘absolutely ridiculous in Paris, in the year of grace 1880’, where the only canals are street gutters, and the drawing rooms have ‘large casement windows and clean panes with neither bubbles nor imperfections’. In another lying stratagem, painters applied ‘standard’ daylight as taught by the ...”