“... of the country, £7.45). The company is no doubt pleased to recognise itself in the image of what David Cameron described a year ago as ‘socially responsible’ capitalism, and its sales have bucked the recession – turnover and profits increased by 15 per cent in 2011. But using eco-friendly packaging and donating unused food to the homeless is one ...”

“... masterplan: he is paid £250,000 a week. (Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that, as David Conn has been jaw-droppingly reporting in the Guardian. Tevez’s ‘economic rights’ apparently belong to an overseas investment company whose ultimate ownership is opaque, and is being disputed in court by post-Soviet oligarchs.) What you get for your ...”

“... like to admit it, by The Way Things Go (1987), a 30-minute film by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Their creation is an example of a Rube Goldberg machine (named after the cartoonist) in which an unlikely number of devices are linked together to create a domino effect – in its original sense the name refers to a machine designed to perform a ...”

“... by sea and land. As the multiple volumes of The History of Cartography, edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward, have shown in painstaking detail, the history of maps – their creation, use and abuse – is the history of a whole series of human efforts to comprehend and organise the physical and social worlds. Monmonier, who is the editor of the ...”

“... or latent presence of this family drama in a wide variety of stories: Cinderella, Snow White, David and Goliath, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gareth, Hamlet, Imogen, Fanny Price and Pip. The following observation is typical of the method: ‘Although Cymbeline rages at Imogen and the Queen is courteous, Imogen is not deceived by her, and we ...”

“... Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of ...”

“... the Tolpuddle Martyrs in a revamped Tyneham), Mike Leigh (via Nuts in May), Nigel Coates, even David Mellor. The piquant list of names should convey something of the flavour of Wright’s book, and also the flavour of Purbeck as he understands its role in 20th-century English culture. Wright’s reminder of how muddled is the broadly ...”

“... when a change of surface texture – say, between one fabric and another – must be registered. (David would let this French tradition of brushwork be the vehicle for political rather than religious probity.) This is a very different craft from the more energetic kind which makes surfaces in Rubens’s paintings seem more alive than the hair or fur or flesh ...”

“... One unfamiliar painting is hard to leave behind. This is the extraordinary picture of King David holding a lira da braccio and looking down on a priest who kneels in prayer before him: a work recognised by Mina Gregori as by Moretto nearly twenty years ago, and which has not been seen in public in Britain for two hundred years. It was once attributed ...”

“... photographs of exhausted marines. Set an amateur snapshot by Vanessa Bell, a glamour portrait by David Bailey, and a picture of a nurse in uniform from Belle View Studio in Bradford against one another. One aim the curators had when they settled on this melange – a multi-layered picture of the nation in photographs – is summed up in the title: How We ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

“... for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians.’ And along the same lines we may suspect ...”

“... the system – the leaks, the water shortages and, most pressingly, the sewers. ‘Consider,’ David Kinnersley wrote in his book Troubled Water, just before the giveaway happened, ‘how much enthusiasm there would be for privatisation in Parliament or the City if it were called sewage privatisation. Although everyone refers to water privatisation, the ...”

“... out a simpler diet than we’re used to, an equivalent for rainy, hectic Britain of what Elizabeth David discerned in the Mediterranean diet when she called it ‘the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat’. Except there’s no romantic sense, as there was in David, of a benign landscape supporting people ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”