“... have a technique in common, Divisionism, but not a lot else. The aim was to achieve luminosity by building up tones with thread-like strokes of pure colour – Pointillism with lines, not spots. The eye would create colours, as it creates them from the black, cyan, magenta and yellow halftone dots of printed illustrations. The tints produced would ...”

“... ughh – the thought of that would set the jowls shuddering. ‘Illustration’ wasn’t just to be despised on its own account, it was a word to be smeared across whatever he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once ...”

“... that exists only in the mind. What is the ‘real’ colour of an object that looks white by day, orange under a street light and pink through rose-tinted spectacles? However, the source of my own moments of disassociation is not, I think, epistemological but a by-product of time spent painting watercolours from ...”

“... combined The Great Dictator with Pulp Fiction and shifted the scene to France? One answer might be Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, but it’s not a great answer because the film itself is so many things. Of the identifiable movies within its fanciful confines, one is rather good, another is so bad you have to like it and the third is ...”

“... a third of the Parliament. But there is a world of difference between Ukip, which just wants to be done with meddling foreigners, and what in essence are anti-austerity, but not anti-European, parties such as Syriza or Podemos. To call them all ‘populists’ is lazy, or even a wilful ideological distortion. Rather than recognising that the main European ...”

“... How​ close can you get? That seems to be the question Lee Miller’s war photographs are trying to answer. In theory, it’s the question behind any action shot, or any embedded reporting, but in Miller’s case it was especially wilful. The only cameras she took with her when she joined the 83rd infantry division of the US army, as it advanced across Europe in 1944, were Rolleiflexes ...”

“... and ten months. I confess to a bit of nostalgia for the nihilism that came with being governed by George W. Bush. For all the continuities, Obama arouses more earnest responses: apologetics, disappointment, head-shaking, Occupy, Edward Snowden. Bush’s arrogance has turned out to be that of a man destined to spend his ...”

“... again. ‘Ssh’ streams across the walls, saturating them: silent noise instructing the viewer to be silent. Flocks of ‘vip’ fly from one side to the other before giving way to large blocks of ‘chang’ and ‘thunga’, then vertical streams of ‘choom’. It’s a cacophony, but the only sound you hear comes from the occasional visitor who can’t ...”

“... A new year​ ! A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’ December/January yadda-yadda of diets and get-fit-quick schemes, to the cultural roundups of the year ahead. The steady increase in all this stuff – the annual binge – is one of the more reliable indicators of the passing of the years, and so it will continue until the demise of print ...”

“... many additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions are detailed in a wonderful new book by Vivien Igoe, The Real People of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (University College Dublin Press, £32), but let’s first pay a visit to The People v. O.J. Simpson, a show that reminded me – as if I needed reminding – that real life is the poor, lost cousin of ...”

“... interestingly, she was also evoking a whole school of New York writers, for whom Mankiewicz could be made to stand representative: a set of wisecracking, worldly figures supposedly attracted to Hollywood by the prospect of copious easy money, who created not a genre of film, but rather a style that prepared the way for ...”

“... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...”

“... isn’t so much a near-miss prophecy as a piece of lugubrious theatre, playing with what used to be called mentalism. This is the territory of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, as it was of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 movie of the same name and the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham on which both are based: a place ...”

“... where they cry out for a collected edition. When such an edition appears, they cannot fail to be recognised as a masterpiece of Scottish literature. I came, while engaged in writing a book about Cockburn, to love his letters, and I have even managed to love those which turned up too late for consideration in the book. A further letter has now arrived in ...”

“... a rather sombre double, a Catholic moralist who is patient rather than amused, it can confidently be said that Small World is the most brilliant and also the funniest he has written. It is, of course, a campus novel, but the campus has been globalised. Lodge avers, through Zapp, that the big-time academics have now no need of a local habitation: they spend ...”