“... in anecdotes or reduce it to his neuroses. Mozart has recently been subjected to this treatment in Peter Shaffer’s clever but meretricious play Amadeus, which turned him into a divinely gifted vulgarian, punning and burping his way through high society. But Hildesheimer’s way with this self-imposed assignment has none of these depressing features. He ...”

“... normality; even Millet’s solid-limbed and blunt-faced peasant girls: it’s hard not to read them as embodiments of desire (women don’t seem to invent men in that way). When men paint portraits of women the facts of a face dilute the archetype. Gustav Klimt created an eloquently sinister, predatory Judith/Salome type. Her jaw is rather square, her ...”

“... this: small heads, holes that transform the solid tree trunk into heavy legs and arms which also read as a landscape of mounds and hollows. The sense this gives that earth and woman are one is emphasised by the way the wood is polished and gouged – the grain follows the form as contours follow the slope of a hill – and led to analyses such as David ...”

“... in a few colours (red and white were particularly effective) of American examples. Those could be read as prefiguring the abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s; the exhibition Abstract Design in American Quilts at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1971, organised by the collector Jonathan Holstein, seemed to slot the quilt into the history of Modernism. It ...”

“... Malcolm. But next time it is up on the old charge of exploitation and fraud I would have the judge read Avedon before he turned to the critics. The few paragraphs in which he describes how he took the pictures for In the American West are the best account of the photographer’s craft I know. They are relevant to work very unlike his own – to ...”

“... one might have expected from Professor Kiernan. It is the work of a man who is prodigiously well-read, in about eight European languages, in touch with recent research (though a few important new studies seem to have slipped past him), but also familiar with almost forgotten classics like R.B. Smith’s Italian Irrigation (1852) or F.W. Hasluck’s splendid ...”

“... link the artworks, and because the art comes from so many hands in so many styles, they tend to read as examples and illustrations even though many of them are very fine in themselves. The show is visually disjunctive but intellectually suggestive.For example, both Walker Evans’s 1938-41 photographs of subway riders and Käthe Kollwitz’s Prisoners, an ...”

“... Kounellis, who said that the task was ‘to tell the tale of the enormous drama of loss’, can be read in terms which are primarily aesthetic; it is significant that he has, over the years, made a number of installations which, unlike Beuys’s, don’t refer to society or politics, but confront the traditional displays and spaces of churches and museums.In ...”

“... of labour, and many of the views are spectacular panoramas, nearly everything here asks to be read, or to be looked at close-up, not admired from a distance. You start from what you know. Noses brush the glass as people search out the present emerging in the past, orienting themselves by following bends in the river and streets with ancient names whose ...”

“... Tourists, for example) and copying royal portraits was the basis of a regular trade. Some copies read as duets; in those Rubens made after Titian and Caravaggio one powerful voice sings along with another. Rubens’s copies never quite lose their Flemish accent but are often splendid in their own right. Like many translations, they show that the felicities a ...”

“... in the game of discrimination; all his friends were rung at one time or another to have a sentence read out for criticism or confirmation. Any visit to his house was likely to involve a discussion about the placing of a sculpture or just how high on the wall a tapestry should hang. He loved arguing about who was the greatest this or that – he was passionate ...”

“... this month. To wear one of them seems a bit like pinning on false medal ribbons, but it can be read as a tribute, too, from fan to hero – and also, perhaps, as evidence of the amateur’s need to get as close as he can to the feel of the real thing. The active imitation that derives from passive admiration and sells billions worth of endorsed ...”

“... a primary question: ‘Who, what kind of person, are you?’ In neither picture can the face be read. Mars’ is in shadow, Venus’ is seen only in a blurred reflection. Even the face of the cupid who holds her mirror is as soft as a photograph taken through a gauze. Look at reproductions in the catalogue* of pictures not in the exhibition and you find ...”

“... pale fire-lit yellow, midnight blue or black. It is a small picture, so you lean forward to read it. You enter its space and wonder, item by item, what next? Will the moon rise or set? Will the family stop with the herdsmen? A picture like this is as close as a single frame can come to telling a sequential story. In the opening pages of The Woodlanders ...”

“... His extensive quotations of financial accounts or from unedited reports of Mozart’s hairdresser read a little like free association in print, as though he finds it hard to shed the procedures that proved so invaluable in his great Haydn chronicles. Thus, a little apologetically, he reprints the complete catalogue of Mozart’s clothing as compiled after his ...”