Sublime

They visited the National Gallery. The Grosvenor Gallery on New Bond Street had opened two years before and was the refuge of Pre-Raphaelite painters. These artists, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, pursued “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art, sufficient unto itself, required no political or moral or religious purpose.

one of the abiding themes of this book—that many of the hopes we hold for a particular marriage are never consummated in the way we originally imagined.

Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled;

purloined,

dross

Sibyl—if