“... Troubling’: that’s the word chosen by Penelope Curtis, the new director of Tate Britain, in her preface to the catalogue for Migrations, the gallery’s recently opened exhibition (it closes on 12 August). She’s referring to the name of the institution she heads. The launch of Tate Modern in 2000 gave Tate curators the thankless and well nigh incoherent task of demarcating which of their holdings belonged to a story about a specific nation and which to a story about value systems in general ...”

“... of the Alps: the ‘Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures’ of the catalogue’s title are represented by the heavily muscled, well-fleshed figures derived from classical sculpture that Gossaert painted from his return from Rome until his death in 1532. The thin, almost emaciated naked bodies of earlier Flemish crucifixions and martyrdoms, and the ...”

“... Le Grand Jury, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, said: ‘I want the veil to be banned in all public spaces.’On 23 October, on the television show CNews, Eric Zemmour, a writer and journalist, mentioned the general who led the French conquest of Algeria: ‘When General Bugeaud arrives in Algeria, he begins to slaughter Muslims, and ...”

“... Or you could – virtually speaking – sit in a quiet corner by yourself and read the newspaper. The possibilities are endless. The web browser as we know it, with hyperlinks you can follow simply by clicking on them, drop-down menus, scroll bars and – crucially – pictures, was ...”

“... There is always something new to look at. The endless steppe is, well, endless; it needs to be lit. So the titles of the Russian pictures tell you to think of time, weather and season rather than location: Morning on the Dniepr, Morning in the Country, The Rooks Have Returned, After the Rain, A Ploughed Field at Evening, Late Autumn, Forest View at ...”

“... Collection, Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time has been taken down into the basement. It can be found there until 5 February, holding a position of honour in Dancing to the Music of Time, an exhibition about the life and work of Anthony Powell. The painting is powerful but decorous. Apollo’s chariot, high in the sky, drives away the clouds of ...”

“... By a happy chance I am reading The Count of Monte Cristo. It acclimatises one to the dramas and Oriental dreams which figure in the exhibition Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (at Tate Britain until 11 May). It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day ...”

“... macaw follow no fashion – they are born elegant and appropriately insulated. They cannot, season by season, startle with new patterns of fur or feathers. People can.We may, snake-like, shed worn-out clothes; we may become bored, disgusted or embarrassed by the way we look. Or, better, we may decide to ...”

“... Household, whose tedious task it now is to ascertain the manner of Diana’s death. Entirely by coincidence, Burgess will also preside over the inquest into the death of Dodi Fayed, because Fayed is buried on the family estate at Oxted, in Surrey, and Burgess is the Surrey Coroner as well as the Coroner of the Queen’s Household. It’s not his job to ...”

“... media, though particularly the BBC, expressing the view that ‘journalism in this country could be one of the causes of social malaise because of its aggression towards those in power in civil society.’ Many of Lloyd’s criticisms of the BBC are hard to disagree with – a wearisome focus on personality and celebrity, a deficit of serious current affairs ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”

“... Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party. On the other hand, the craze for ethical living relies rather heavily on its own kind of consumerism and being green can seem merely a question of where ...”

“... The Big Issue, the magazine sold on the streets by the homeless, is ten years old this month. The next three issues will describe and celebrate its history; the first of these – available on street corners in almost any town in Britain of any size you care to name – leads with an extract from Tessa Swithinbank’s book Coming up from the Streets: The Story of the ‘Big Issue’ (Earthscan, £12 ...”

“... it is as though a Rembrandt-like stickiness of paint or a Hals-like dash has been multiplied by some large factor.These signals of seriousness in the work are reinforced by what one reads of the life. Auerbach has worked in the same studio for most of it, has used friends and family as models, often painting the same ...”

“... for Iraq that drives them to terrorism’ etc). Yet people talked about them as a ‘joke’. By the end of the year Blair had been contradicted by almost everybody, including the home secretary’s Muslim advisers and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, yet the no-connection routine has been given a new lease of life ...”