“... transformation of girls’ clothes into women’s came at the very end of the 18th century, when white muslin, high-waisted shifts with short, puffed sleeves suggested a revolutionary freedom and a girlish innocence. Much later, the shift dresses with very short skirts of Yves Saint Laurent and Courrèges brought to 1960s parties styles which are remarkably ...”

“... of the mountain. In The Blue Rigi Venus, the morning star, is reflected in the lake and burns white in a cobalt sky which will gradually reach down to replace the dawn-yellow band on the horizon. In achieving these effects, Turner has not borrowed the broad brushstrokes of the wash sketches. Rather, he builds up much of the surface of the pictures with ...”

“... way you have to concentrate to keep your sense of direction. I suppose it’s much the same with white-outs in the Arctic or the mountains, but I’ve never been in one of those. Once you enter the bright clamminess of Blind Light the experience you have is about as structureless as any a three-dimensional work can offer – more so, for example, than what ...”

“... through the door from another party – the men’s coats unbuttoned, the women’s bosoms as white as their eyes are bright. The Hogarths, a decent, prosperous lot, are here for the food and drink. The Hilliards – some in allusive fancy dress – are full of poetry. The Freuds, who haven’t dressed up at all, slump in armchairs. Some of them fall ...”

“... are passages of wiry drawing in some plates – for example, the figure of Pitt as Death and the white horse which carries him in Presages of the Millennium – which only the most vigorous and controlled pen drawing could match, and which only a master in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard ...”

“... but you can’t be certain that this is a scene with a top and a bottom. In Painting with White Form of 1913 the black lines are more likely to have lives of their own. As you follow these changes you come to realise how eagerly the eye searches for structure – top/bottom, near/far, object/ground. Horizontal and vertical have their place too. The ...”

“... treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland.’ These colourful pleasures are shown in black and white, for this is an exhibition dominated by engravings. Reynolds’s portrait of Garrick being tugged right and left by Comedy and Tragedy is here, but as a mezzotint. Hogarth’s work is represented in the form of drawings and prints, not paintings. The ...”

“... the Impressionists and not with the Russians. Kandinsky’s abstracts and Malevich’s black-on-white circle – it hangs like a full stop in the last room and seems to announce not just the end of the exhibition but the end of old painting – are as well known from histories of modern art as Matisse’s Dance and as much written about, if not, perhaps, as ...”

“... the Annales School; and finally of US-centred literary theory. ‘Tropologists’ such as Hayden White and, latterly, Frank Ankersmit made their own attempt to fill the vacuum by suggesting that, since there was apparently no other structural principle to hand, the kernel of historical writing must be found in its exemplification of deep, ahistorical ...”

“... the foreground of the story, a charismatic stranger has walked into town, clad in loose white garments and carrying a rifle. He has curls, a beard, intense and disturbing milky-blue eyes and a golden body. He talks like a religious huckster but the locals are mesmerised by the splendid opals he shows them. Soon they’re in business ...”

“... into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”

“... included leading figures from the Independent Group, such as Eduardo Paolozzi and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who displayed a series of found objects in a post-apocalyptic mirrored shed. Richard Hamilton’s group presented a funfair vision that launched the British Pop Art movement. Robby the Robot, star of the science-fiction movie Forbidden ...”

“... which are most convincing when the printed line can cling to the drawn structure. The Death of St Peter Martyr of 1530, which Vasari believed to be the best thing Titian had done up to that time, was destroyed in a fire. There is a copy of it, and a handsome woodcut. If the latter was our only record Vasari’s enthusiasm would be mysterious in a way that ...”