“... It is interesting that Richard Serra, who is not short of offers of highly promising locations for which to make site-specific sculptures, accepted the Tate’s invitation to do something in their domineering central hall – a space ostensibly built for showing sculpture but serving that purpose rather badly, partly because it makes the things put into it look as if they were lost at the bottom of a well, partly because its huge Ionic columns dwarf other forms in the same field of vision ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... from Jacobean plays, one of them being: Security some men call the suburbs of hell, Only a dead wall between. It deals with the deeds of a murderous maniac, and we are encouraged to suspect eccentric old ladies and retired naval officers, Harry the fisherman and his small-boy pal, Killer, while feeling mildly compassionate toward the innocent, the ...”

“... any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard Burton, who arrived in 1855 and was probably the first European to enter this Muslim stronghold. The other is the nomadic French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who worked here as a trader in the 1880s, and who made the place – more than anywhere in his ...”

“... which frame windows or mirrors (the latter reflecting the former), and between each arch the wall is enlivened by panels bordered with gilded scrolls and tendrils that break into the frames of the paintings above. The same playful spirit, the same determination to tease the mind as well as delight the eye, shaped the character of rococo furniture. The ...”

“... She is crouched on all fours, her head turned to one side, and positioned high up on the gallery wall. Her anatomy is deliberately hard to take in. Viewers must crane their necks to see her. She seems ready to pounce. Lilith, or the lilith, is a figure from Mesopotamian and Jewish demonology. She – in early sources Lilith was sometimes male and sometimes ...”

“... compiled is impressive and often amusing. Back to Seneca they go, and forwards and outwards to Richard Brautigan. Busily, the melons, pumpkins and gourds are gathered in. Each quotation is given, cacophonously, in its original language (the translations appear elsewhere, which is a monstrous imposition), and its meaning rapidly adduced. Bit by bit ...”

“... beauty of Venice lies in part in what has crumbled, in the evidence of decay. We were shown the wall of a church where tiny flakes of the original plaster indicated not only that the brickwork had been covered, but that the covering was neatly inscribed with lines – like the brick wallpaper you can get for doll’s-houses. Making any part of the city just ...”

“... looking like trains of ants weaving their way into the city. My desk was in a booth by a low wall that separated me from John’s secretary, the formidable RoseMarie Terenzio. John depended on no one more than RoseMarie. ‘Here’s the deal,’ I’d hear her say, before the door to John’s office slammed shut.San Diego or Chicago? That was the ...”

“... and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine was not beleued of vs sodainly, but by their continuall ...”

“... Twomblys, accidental Jackson Pollocks, accidental works by Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois or Richard Tuttle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. (See recent coup to the right: an accidental Philip Guston. Guston’s 1968 painting Boot is above, and below a CE artist’s picture, now in my collection, of an eight-fingered glove.) At such moments, you not only feel ...”

“... I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet; windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite. My father looks like my father in pictures I have of him. I look like … well, actually I don’t have any pictures of me at that age. But I’m sure I looked pretty much like the memory I can call up at will. It’s not ...”

“... strung like a harp which we gaze at in dumbfounded silence. These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever drinking the world’s waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire flaming inside it. Or a longboat made of stakes and stones and turf, grounded in ...”

“... on some of the trips for the sake of the photo opportunities. He smiled obligingly at the Great Wall, declaring that ‘a people who could build a wall like this certainly have a great past to be proud of and a people who have this kind of a past must also have a great future.’ He attended a performance of one of Madame ...”