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“... Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie Barrington, in 1915, and finally by Norman St John Stevas between 1965 and 1986. Prochaska chose to present Bagehot in the first person ‘because I thought Bagehot could speak more vividly of his life and mind than I could as an intermediary in a conventional biography’. I rather sympathise with ...”

“... using fMRI – notably, Semir Zeki – have pointed art studies in a significant new direction. John Onians and Barbara Maria Stafford, both art historians, certainly think so, though Neuroarthistory and Echo Objects argue the case in quite different ways. What might the far view be, from this new bend in the road? Suppose we could arrive at adequate ...”

“... They are value-laden, and the values are subject to change. Such change is the central topic of John Woolford’s book. He, like Tucker, is interested in ‘the incidents in the development of a soul’ – specifically, the soul of a Victorian poet subject to, and struggling for mastery of, Romantic poetics: but he narrates that process as one of ...”

“... from ‘Fenians out of jail’, some of whom, like the Irish-American poet John Boyle O’Reilly, were now eminently respectable figures: but ‘They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na-Gael’ was a just, if unkind comment on the Parnellite use of Irish-American revolutionary organisations for fund-raising. It might be ...”

“... fare. It was true that Don Juan was little understood ‘just now’. His once loyal publisher, John Murray, had backed out after the first five cantos, and the leading periodicals of the time refused on principle to review any of its instalments. (‘We knew not any severity of criticism which could reach the faults or purify the taste of Don Juan,’ the ...”

“... and Winifred’s Nazi sympathies threw up another problem, of the kind which fascinated Ruskin in different contexts: Parsifal meant a great deal, not only to men of real integrity like Knappertsbusch and Furtwängler, but also to Clemens Krauss and Karajan, who saw no reason to dally over joining the Nazi Party. If we find it disturbing that Krauss ...”

“... Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather unconscious ...”

“... his first book, from 1958, and republished it in 2001, with an introduction by his friend John Ashbery.* Schuyler is first and last a poet, but the other books shed interesting light on the poetry. ‘For readers of his poetry, the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,’ begins Nathan Kernan’s ...”

“... that the Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to do a labourer out of his rights’. Ruskin deplored ‘the flood of human idiotism’ and ‘the loathsome thoughts and vulgar inquisitiveness’ provoked by the case. In this new study, Rohan McWilliam argues that ‘the Tichborne cause reveals a mosaic of mentalities and attitudes that we still ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... the Emperor Frederick II in the 12th century and by the philosopher Albert the Great in the 13th. John Gerard had resurrected the belief in his Herball in 1597. In sum, then, the separation of man and the natural world was not a new phenomenon, invented as mankind for the first time gained complete mastery over nature. For though we are told that in the 17th ...”

“... whom they forgive.It wasn’t that he was particularly good-looking – according to his friend John Lehmann he was ‘a great, untidy, sprawling figure of a young man’. Virginia Woolf blamed his lack of looks on his father’s family: ‘He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd ...”

“... a place he knew about but did not know. The limitation of this is revealed, unintentionally, by Ruskin in his famous praise of ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’: ‘It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work.’ The poems encapsulate what ...”

“... part in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, John Russell Pope, supplied a mausoleum for the Huntingtons, adapted Frick’s townhouse as a public gallery and designed the National Gallery of Art. The increasingly difficult and radical character of modern art may have further reinforced these ...”

“... replied: ‘Burke abused, Cobbett inveighed, Arnold was capable of malicious insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable: but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation or even malice, is any less genuine.’ Here, en toutes lettres, is the polemicist’s warrant. Edward’s own ...”