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“... There are two British world-class painters, Turner and Constable; but there are a number of others – at least as original and interesting as their contemporaries on the Continent – who created the English School of painting in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake ...”

“... them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the trade of silver-engraving, and to become a painter, at a time when the fine arts conferred on their practitioners ...”

“... Turner, Baudelaire writing his greatest piece around a minor illustrator whom he could re-invent. Ronald Paulson is at his best when he is hammering out parallels between writers and painters, when he can lay a text over a picture and work up a fit. The essays collected here were written between 1977 and 1984, at the same time as he was writing his ...”

“... In what until now has been the standard (indeed pretty much the sole) account of the phenomenon, Ronald Paulson characterised jestbooks as writing from below, as labouring-class culture defiantly thumbing its nose at polite taste. Inexpensive chapbooks of the kind produced by the Dicey family in the middle decades of the century, and distributed via a ...”

“... To questions like this the catalogue has no answer. It insists that nothing is hidden: those like Ronald Paulson or Ann Bermingham who have suggested that Constable’s canvasses may be screening out psychic or political anxieties are mentioned only to be wished away. They have had no influence, we are told, on Parris or Fleming-Williams or the couple of ...”

“... Revolution, that wonderfully stimulating revaluation of high and low art in the revolutionary era, Ronald Paulson has argued that prints operate as halls of mirrors in which the politics of state endlessly reflect and are reflected by the politics of patriarchy, of sexuality and gender, of young and old, plebeian and patrician. ...”

“... president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash ...”