“... fill the rest of the scene (a youth with two spears guards Antigone; behind Creon is a boy, and a white-haired woman, perhaps his wife). The painter probably had a play in mind; the portico, in which Heracles stands, will be part of the permanent stage-set. Aristotle quite certainly had a play in mind, for he quotes a verse from it.There was, then, not just ...”

“... the island. (These duties ranged from shearing sheep to building jetties to painting the tower white.) During this period the third keeper would prepare a lavish three-course lunch. (Lunch duty was rotated on a weekly basis.) Your next watch would be from two until six in the afternoon but this was usually a quiet period, with only a few radio tests to ...”

“... affiliations. Colour is not a precise language – it is black for mourning in some societies and white in others – but there are enough associations (warm reds, ice greens) for it to have a poetry of association. Black dyes have always been in demand. They are as close as you can get to no colour at all. The lawyer’s gown, the dark business suit and the ...”

“... Like his near-namesake, Tristram Shandy, the unlikely hero of Peter Carey’s new novel begins the story of his life at the very beginning. While he doesn’t go into quite as much detail about the moment of his conception, he appears to have a very clear memory of the minutes leading up to his delivery. As his mother leaves her theatre (where she has been rehearsing the Scottish Play) and sets out for the hospital, things started happening faster than she had expected ...”

“... having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della ...”

“... of low expectations’. ‘Bush’s conversational storytelling makes for engaging reading,’ Peter Baker writes in the New York Times. ‘It’s folksy, sharply observed and surprisingly affecting,’ Michiko Kakutani says in the same paper. ‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial Times. ‘Bush Jr’s new memoir doesn’t ...”

“... devising new types of midway meeting between man and machine is at a premium in Turner’s work. Peter Corrigan, whose mission in the jungles of New Guinea forms the backbone of the narrative, actually is a camera: that is to say, he has only to look at a scene in order to register it, and subcutaneous circuits enable him to store his footage with maximum ...”

“... who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as Peter Carey ends his new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a ...”

“... on saving the heritage, but they also find the restored Gothick Tent at Painshill ‘a little too white and pristine’. The huge baroque memorial which Lord Ashton, the linoleum magnate, built to one of his three wives in 1906 cost him £87,000; £600,000 has been found for its restoration. It would make a very fine ruin, and £600,000 would build a fine ...”

“... but in an uneasy and nightmarish way. A technical decision – to paint with pure colours on a wet white ground – determined the look of the bright and detailed (as against the dreamy and clouded) kind of Pre-Raphaelite picture. Painfully brilliant carmines and greens; square yards of turf or river bank reproduced near life-size, leaf by leaf and flower by ...”

“... the middle-ranking managerial and technical cadres of industry, proverbially the ICI man-in-the-white-coat; teachers, younger doctors, community workers: people of all kinds who wanted to get on with it, to find scope for their skills and help to build the New Britain. We believed that with Labour and Wilson it could be done. It is important today that we ...”

“... an erotic element in the original iconography, which was elaborated on demand.’ Cargo ships and white men with bottles and pipes disappear; the market demands that indigenous art speak of indigenous things. Thomas uses the Palauan example in convincing support of the thesis that the ‘resilience and vigour of indigenous and post-colonial cultures is simply ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... was about a tragic love affair between a Moroccan from one of the dish cities and a rich white girl from the hockey suburbs. Buruma writes about it at length, making it plain that Van Gogh wasn’t a racist and that his sympathies lay with the two young lovers. For Van Gogh, the enemy was the establishment, not the other race or creed. Fortuyn, his ...”

“... wave’ of Russian emigration. But others, including the organisations of monarchists, White Army veterans and ‘Solidarists’, had their roots in the first-wave emigration that had left Russia after the Revolution. First-wave émigrés – more comfortably settled than the DPs into an anti-communist stance, and, above all, savvy veterans of the ...”