“... In the Great Book of Beginning we read That the word was God and was with God And are betrayed by the tiniest seed Of all the world’s beginnings, to thrash Like sprats in a bucket, caught in deed As in essence by shapes of ourselves, Our sounds the only bargains we may plead. So starts this solipsistic essay about words, Its first stanza chasing its own tail, Since no word will betray another word In this sodality, self-repressing and male, And we discover, hardly believing our eyes And ears, a sort of chromatic scale, That whatever lives and feels is logos ...”

“... as through grammar and the translation of set phrases.The boys and the few girls who learned to read, write and speak Latin often received an education in drama along the way. The plays of Terence were a mainstay of education in ancient Rome thanks to his exemplary style. Medieval and early modern teachers recognised their pedagogical potential and used ...”

“... My first encounter with Peter Medawar revealed something about us both. When he was the new Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham I was a student at University College, Nottingham, and one of my tasks as president of the student Zoological Society was to give votes of thanks to visiting speakers ...”

“... Bramante built his Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio: a little, round, domed martyrium – Saint Peter met his end nearby. It stands on the watershed that divides the style of the Early from that of the High Renaissance, and announces the feel of much that will follow. The Casino at Marino, the pavilion Sir William Chambers built early on in his ...”

“... but in both cases graphic design allows scanning (as against reading), and allows those buyers who read very little of the continuous text to feel that they have had their money’s worth from the paper. The ingredients of the graphic style which Brody gave The Face included ‘abstract’ Bauhaus-like alphabets, headlines letter-spaced so that long and short ...”

“... Jones’s Archway (a sculpture in the Heathrow Hilton, Ballard’s favourite London building), you read that ‘sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one could never fall in love, or need to.’ Even when the overlap between a work and anything Ballard wrote is accidental, or ...”

“... helmet, conceptually speaking, his head is made of cardboard. On the other hand, the officer has read The Rebel; his head is enlightened, and so he does not believe in the mark of Cain. He’s spent time in museums, and when he aims his rifle at a boy, as an ambassador of Culture he updates and recycles Goya’s etchings and Guernica. War I, too, have ...”

“... he said. He became politically active campaigning for Brexit. In a lull in our conversation he read aloud the Bible inscriptions etched on the ceiling. ‘I’m not terribly religious, but the past, the present and the future should all be taken into account,’ he told me. I was happy to chat. I had time to kill: my online application for a press pass had ...”

“... include only a single bowl of flowers, a single glass or a single jug. They are easy pictures to read, very little in them is redundant. In the painting of a City dinner, the faces are little more than pink blobs, differentiated just enough for you to see who is bald, who has a moustache, who wears glasses. But sometimes it takes a moment to get the ...”

“... exteriors, but once over the threshold shopkeepers go their own way. Misalliances can be read in a seepage of logos and lettering which compromises the conformity of façades (or, if you like, enlivens them). A Mile of Style: 180 Years of Luxury Shopping on Regent Street at the Guildhall Art Gallery until 30 June covers both buildings and ...”

“... which introduced these things into the emotional lives of the mass of the population. No one can read Quaife’s book and still believe that. Lawrence Stone could surely not have written as he did in his Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 if he had had that knowledge of the really telling evidence which Quaife thinks he should have had. The other ...”

“... context, artful. As artful as, say, Mario Sorrenti’s blurred pictures of a girl on a stool which read as photographic transcriptions of Bacon paintings. Photographs have lost the special status they had as evidence, but we still sort out, as far as we can, the real from the make-believe. Sometimes (as in the case of Sally Mann’s pictures of her ...”

“... of insects and pollen grains has so much in common with computer-graphic renderings that they read as abstractions. My optical toys, on the other hand, let you explore what you see, not see something beyond what you know. They enlarge no more than a few times, at the most a few tens of times. Sitting in an orchard last week I saw pied flycatchers make ...”

“... is Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique – a bright idea, for Voltaire’s Dictionary is still read with delight by those who have come to think the better-known Candide intolerably tiresome. Voltaire’s is not, of course, a dictionary in the sense of being a work of reference in which one looks things up, but something more in the style of a ...”

“... on pattern and detail rather than light, shade or movement. Dürer’s prints pull you in; you read them piece by piece. They invite commentary. Peter-Klaus Schuster wrote a two-volume book about Melancholia; the catalogue,* which says that the print ‘must be the most written about image in the history of ...”