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“... The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to disperse the sense of unique significance sticking to the year. Mason points out that the original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone ...”

“... purpose and original setting of a single Renaissance altarpiece. It provided what is still the best account of the treatment of the Immaculate Conception in old Italian art. Carmichael deplored the limited outlook of the scholars of his day who were uninterested in the religious nature of the art they catalogued, and expressed his outrage at their ...”

“... of Tehran where a bus will pick us up, I feel a mild sensation of dread. My people – my father, Nicholas (brother), Rory (oldest friend), Christina (cousin) and Camilla (relieved ex-girlfriend) – are undeniably different from the Ghezelayagh family and appendages. It would be foolish to expect the two families to bond instantly when the son of a retired ...”

“... when Cumberland’s favourite son returns home, he does so as novelist or as researcher. At its best, Bragg’s prose exhibits a kind of effortless brio, a vertical take-off into rhetorical excess. Vivid and often violent imagery course through For Want of a Nail, which from its opening line pulses with a child’s awareness of conflict, real and imaginary ...”

“... the west, opening to the public on 5 April 1838. In the same month the first instalment of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’s third novel, was published. Together with most of London’s fashionable society, Dickens visited the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions in order to see ‘those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black velvet ...”

“... involve durable traditional materials and sculptural relief look cheap and superficial, or at best like expensive wrapping. Architecture, one of the nobler forms of public service, which once consulted the past to secure the approbation of posterity, looks more and more like a branch of public relations, plundering old buildings for a new look or market ...”

“... We are given an even more glowing portrait of the Catalan sculptor Xavier Corbero, Hughes’s best buddy, indeed almost blood brother (‘we have, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, shared the same girls in Europe and America’). Notable among the less flattering portraits is that of Hughes’s first wife, Danne, whose hectic promiscuity and pursuit ...”

“... considered El Greco to be a ‘clever, but eccentric and rather repulsive painter’ whose best works ‘show a strange mixture of powerful, though frequently false, colouring and execrable drawing’. In 1867 Robinson tried in vain to sell an important El Greco to the gallery. In May 1895, not long after Layard died, he offered the Expulsion of the ...”

“... competition Vasari commends is that of artist pitched against artist in the attempt to produce the best possible work for a discerning patron or public. New technology or cheaper materials or lower prices were immaterial in the contest between Brunelleschi and Ghiberti or Raphael and Sebastiano. Moreover, a very important factor which Goldthwaite never ...”

“... funny thing is, that apart from that skewed ‘natural’, Mr Rogers was more or less right, the best attempts of the militia and the navy notwithstanding. The implantation of thoughts – the ideas that are conceived when someone fucks up your head – is as much Phillips’s Big Theme as the whole saga of deracination, both black and white. This is what ...”

“... less mixed feelings towards his mentor. The Nude, published in 1956, is not only Clark’s best book, but one of the finest books on the visual arts written in English. Into it one may feel that much of the best German writing on the history of art during the previous half-century has flowed. No one who had not ...”

“... small because of the difficulty in placing them.’ Feynman soon joined the emigration of the best and brightest physicists to General Groves’s boot camp at Los Alamos. His chief duty there was to run the computer division at a time before computers were available. His tools were a roomful of Babbage-style mechanical calculators, later supplemented with ...”

“... are paintings transported from obscurity, rescued from store or transformed by cleaning; but, best of all, familiar masterpieces appear in a new light.One of the masterpieces owned by the Duke of Sutherland which has been in Edinburgh on loan for over half a century, Titian’s painting of the Virgin seated in a landscape and watched by the suntanned ...”

“... of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit for discoveries, how can historians hope to do better, let alone ...”