Brian Dillon

There are​ many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the morning before the nice things press on her: ‘Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice,’ she says in ‘Morning, Noon & Night’. ‘It ought not to be too ripe – in fact...

The Foundling Hospital​ was established in Bloomsbury in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram, ‘for the education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children’. Strictly speaking, they weren’t foundlings: the parents, or more usually the mother, had to hand over their offspring and were instructed to ‘affix on each child some particular writing, or other...

I cycled​ to the Design Museum on my secondhand Carlton: a ten-speed club racer built in Worksop, Nottinghamshire in 1979 and later outfitted (plastic mudguards, ugly rack, slightly chunky tyres) as a light touring bike and ideal commuter. It is pretty much the bicycle I wanted when I was 14 – you might guess: it’s bright red – but then I ended up with a...

Among​ the more modestly engaging works in Ai Weiwei’s spectacular and somewhat dispiriting exhibition at the Royal Academy (until 13 December) is a framed wire coathanger, stretched and bent to form a face in profile. It is recognisably the face of Marcel Duchamp, especially if you know his Self-Portrait in Profile, from 1957. Ai made Hanging Man in 1985, two years into a decade-long...