“... from February to November 1533; de Selve, whose mission, if any, is obscure, from about March to May.Behind the two personages and the table between them is a heavy green curtain, and they and the table are standing on a floor elegantly coloured and patterned in squares and circles enclosed in a continuous decorative band; it looks like a mosaic but has none ...”

“... a hearty, back-slapping, unquenchably loquacious Army type, though there is just a hint that he may be homosexual. As a boy, the narrator hero-worships him, and when they meet again years later Medlicott insists on treating him as an old friend, dining him at expensive restaurants or taking him on exhausting pub crawls. The narrator cannot make up his mind ...”

“... that he needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse. But whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one. Bookish children are advised to get their noses out of a book and take some fresh air. (As a troubled adolescent myself, reading obliviously in the midst of a performance of family life, I was given knitting needles and wool.) And ...”

“... will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution. Once the ‘Arabs’ in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as ‘Muslims’ it was easy to elicit support for Israel’s demographic ...”

“... from Richard Shilleto, a Cambridge don, a riposte entitled simply Thucydides or Grote? That may be a more complex question than Shilleto realised. Thucydides argued that the Athenian Empire was hated by its subject peoples; admirers of Athenian democracy are naturally eager to confute that judgment. Moreover, though Thucydides has a fair claim to be ...”

“... and cathedral cloisters, but in 1685, when Philadelphia died, it was still common. Her husband may have wished to record his terrible loss in the dignity of an ancient language, but there was little point in listing the merits of Lady Mary if few other ladies, very few of her servants and fewer still among the poor could read about them. Two centuries ...”

“... and profane readings implies that his art will do more than finally float down to a level that may be solemn, but is essentially, and merely, aesthetic. At the Rothko Chapel in Houston, and in the rooms in which the Seagram murals have been displayed in the Tate, people gather and sit quietly. But when you stop thinking, and start looking, you’re left ...”

“... a plaque, to mark the site of the US Army Disciplinary Training Center where Pound was held from May to November 1945 for treasonable broadcasts on Radio Rome. The DTC was in Metato, a small town in a swathe of unremarkable farmland north of Pisa. Nowadays, from a couple of spots in the middle of nowhere you can look back across the plain to the Baptistry ...”

“... Genzken’s example, take on both grotty and seemly, implicitly neat, even elegant forms. It may be no accident that of the ones I remember those by women are of the seemly kind – Sarah Sze comes to mind. On the one hand, you can feel that this is a picture of human civilisation overwhelmed by its inability to stop turning raw materials into ...”

“... a video booth in St Peter’s where you can listen to cardinals defending the virgin birth. It may have seemed necessary because this is a joint exhibition to which the American Museum of Natural History and other US institutions have contributed. The voices are from America, where creationism is a greater threat to science teaching. (Not that the British ...”

“... psychological effects – these are aspects of the dystopian society we all live in now. Ballard may have started out as a science fiction writer, but his texts now read as social fact.’ When you pick up the daily paper and read of casual violence on a run-down estate or see plans for a new road, hypermarket or runway, it is easy to feel Ballardian ...”

“... football tournaments: the Republic of Ireland’s nil-nil draw with Liechtenstein in the mid 1990s may have been a low point, but the RTE commentator was happy enough to inform us that there were 20 people signing on in the entire country. Other interesting facts: Liechtenstein is now the only absolute monarchy in Europe, after its king decided he was bored ...”

“... to drink from, hats are to wear. In an art gallery, where the relevance of the use such objects may once have had is diminished, the question ‘What is it for?’ seems obtuse. The function of works of art is, on the whole, to be splendidly themselves. Yet ask the question of the 17th-century Spanish religious paintings and polychrome sculptures that are ...”

“... Egyptian things still close packed in crowded cases was a reminder that, while a new environment may draw you in, it is the things themselves that keep you coming back. Acquisitiveness, curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge, aesthetic pleasure: these are enough to explain why some things were collected. They don’t always explain why we want to go and look at ...”

“... Chris Ofili, ‘Mono Amarillo’ (1999-2002) A shrine may be personal, private, even secret. It is a place where votive objects (models of limbs, figures, charms) are collected, where sacrifices are made, where curious memorials, fading flowers, dishes of food, are left. Here gods are propitiated, saints appealed to, spirits appeased ...”