“... Such a work has also, of course, to live in a world that may fill it with meaning or form; John Cage had already observed of some white paintings of Rauschenberg’s that they were ‘landing strips’ for light and shadow. Cage, whose 4’33” is just the most notorious instance of an apparently silent work filled with inadvertent sound, liked to ...”

“... include one of Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin, as spectators at the trial of fellow radical John Thelwall, that shows every sign of being done swiftly, but delicately, on the spot; portraits like that of Mary Hamilton, made in 1789, show his flattering response to pretty women in full, early bloom. A study for Satan as the Fallen Angel shows why ...”

“... and sought to bring a private suit for criminal libel, appeared to have it on the ropes; how John Wells felt that his jokes were ‘ostentatiously removed, spat on and ground into the carpet’ after brainstorming sessions with the others; how, as time went on, Ingrams loved to wind up his colleagues in the office, push his chair back and look on at the ...”

“... identified as causes of disease. Bad smells and visible grime were easier to point to. Long after John Snow’s demonstration that something waterborne would explain the distribution of cholera cases in the area served by the Broad Street pump (his plan of the area, mapping mortality, is on display) the theory that it was a miasma – infected air – that ...”

“... her mind Bishop knew things weren’t that rosy. She was also a novelist – the second cousin of John Irving, she often boasted – and in her three novels (so far unpublished) she was less confident of her prospects. The heroine of the most recent, Amazon Fever, is a female scientist at an Alabama university who is burdened by guilt over the death of her ...”

“... crucial date in the story of how colour entered the world of art photography is 1976, the year John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised an exhibition of William Eggleston’s colour prints. Many people were shocked: first because the leading museum of modern art was willing to exhibit colour ...”

“... start, we find Hepworth and the other carvers of her generation – Henry Moore, Ursula Edgcumbe, John Skeaping – making common cause with a slightly older cohort, Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Gaudier-Brzeska, Elsie Henderson, Alan Durst. In works produced both before and after World War One, they began to remake the look and feel of the carving ...”

“... of a head, the angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her ...”

“... Hondros tell their stories in Reporting Iraq, a gripping little book, put together by Mike Hoyt, John Palattella and their colleagues at the Columbia Journalism Review from hours of interviews with reporters and editors (Melville House, $21.95). Hoyt and Palattella have shaped their material to produce a roughly chronological account of the war in the words ...”

“... James, however, they do represent one of the contexts in which he started writing, a context that John Sutherland describes as being ‘interestingly Jamesian’. Besides, searching out unattributed work by major writers is a much more worthwhile enterprise than claiming, like Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm, that Branwell Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, or ...”

“... Did all Van Dyck’s male sitters really have the long-fingered, blue-veined hands that Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard share with the Abbé Scaglia and so many others? Were the hands of Rembrandt’s sitters really all solid and paw-like? Those of Jacob Trip, his wife, Margaretha de Geer, and Hendrickje Stoffels seem to be generated by the ...”

“... Cranach was paid for 60 pairs of portraits of the late electors of Saxony, Frederick the Wise and John the ...”

“... have had much effect on the SNP’s thinking on independence. The deputy first minister, John Swinney, has said that an independent Scotland would keep the pound, even if it remained within the EU. Legally a second referendum could prove tricky, if not impossible. One alternative may be for Scotland to leave the EU with the rest of the UK, repatriate ...”

“... Tower at the novel’s opening, and who was based on Samuel Chenevix Trench, whom Oliver St John Gogarty (the model for Mulligan) met in Oxford. Chenevix Trench, Gogarty and young Joyce had lived in the Martello Tower at Sandycove in September 1904. Haines will always be the ‘ponderous Saxon … bursting with money and indigestion’, the ...”

“... him as an apostle.) The 18th-century engraver George Vertue wrote a book about Thomas Simon; John Evelyn referred to him in Numismata, his discourse on medals, seals and coins. These objects, Evelyn wrote, ‘are the most lasting and vocal monuments of antiquity’. Proof, evidence and art are all involved, and in the 17th century proving who you said ...”