“... moments. But it isn’t bound to get lost in them, as in a series of whirlpools. Consider what may be going on when Deneuve’s character, Fabienne (Fabienne being Deneuve’s middle name), tells Binoche’s character, Lumir, that she couldn’t possibly understand how it feels to be an actress, and when, in an interview, she reflects on her successors in ...”

“... dogs, which were then sold as pets. The prairie dog keepers began to fall ill with monkeypox in May; 72 people were infected, all recovered, and none spread the infection to their human contacts. In Europe there have been only a few monkeypox cases in recent years, all involving a history of travel to Africa. So the big outbreak that started in the middle ...”

“... on experience – which ultimately amounts to a bias in favour of life. The order of physics may be value-neutral: bio-medicine cannot be. We must, of course, strive to achieve stricter criteria for defining the sound and the pathological, but this has to do, not with fact-gathering and experimentation, but with conceptual clarification. This is not to ...”

“... their infant eyelids and steeped their infant souls in blessed forgetfulness.’ The sympathy may be accepted, but in no way can the words be taken as a ‘voice’ from the past, for they can never have been spoken. Liz Lochhead on lodging with relatives has the rhythms of spoken speech. It is not the village Hampdens of Scottish life that we need from ...”

“... to describe thickly – an expression he uses elsewhere – the Balinese theatre state. While some may object to his occasional rhetorical overkill or methodological vagueness, most would, I think, agree that this work is a masterpiece of a kind. Geertz succeeds perhaps better than anyone else could in achieving the ends he seeks: dissecting and depicting Bali ...”

“... as singing and raw as anything in modernist painting. Here the conviction of Munch’s performance may sag, there it may sharpen: the quality follows no consistent arc. He comes across as a quickfire but resourceful workman, kept busy by his progressive-minded patrons. A 1917 portrait of a government lawyer slickly ...”

“... to do with politics to be mild-mannered and level-headed, so when Paul Krugman came to London in May to promote his book End This Depression Now! (Norton, £14.99), even my landlord was impressed. Becoming a political pundit was never Krugman’s aspiration. You can tell he considers it slumming. His technocratic style suits American liberals’ idea of ...”

“... catalogue essays are strong on history and biography) is a question to return to.* Titles may explain subjects. They can also point to stylistic connections. Surreal titles turn up regularly: Woman Stabbed by the Sun Reciting Rocket Poems in the Geometrical Shapes of the Musical Bat Spittle Flight of the Sea (1939), while others like Burnt Canvas ...”

“... so close. None of this was new to Abyei. It had all happened before. Exactly three years ago, in May 2008, Abyei the town was razed during an invasion from the North over the same issues. ‘The North does not want us, it wants our land,’ one Dinka sub-chief, Kuol Deng Maluak, had told me, not long before the town was occupied. His friends murmured ...”

“... might be. The inclusion of a few canvases sets up interesting tensions. George Frederic Watts may have been Cameron’s mentor in developing a modern heroic portraiture, yet when their respective visions of Tennyson’s daughter-in-law May Prinsep are set side by side, I find that his tremulous, scrawny brushwork sets ...”

“... expression of both. If handwriting disappears, he warns, ‘some other elements of civilised life may die with this art, or skill, or habit.’ But maybe to focus on penmanship, as Hensher does, is to underestimate other clues about the arts of reading and writing that could help him identify the threat more clearly. If the aspiration to read is gradually ...”

“... and asking it to turn maroon. We’d sooner rot. I sometimes feel as if I were rotting, though it may just be the lack of sun, the fact that I hear the automated voice on the Tube saying ‘Next station Camden Town’ in my dreams and that I’m constantly asked what I think of London. I’ve come around to saying, ‘It’s not love/hate, more like mild ...”

“... Nelson has hung a number of large dusty plaques bearing Commonwealth flags and the legend ‘Long May They Reign’. At their centre, instead of the regal ‘GR’, is the cursive ‘GE’ of General Electric. The galleries were paid for by Lord Duveen of Millbank, energetic and ingenious purveyor of Old Masters to the grandest industrialists and financiers ...”

“... the disaster, what the people want to hear coincides with what the military want to show, so it may not, after all, be a simple matter of the people’s view prevailing. Paranoia, incidentally, afflicts a large part of the Russian press, even under normal circumstances. In the tabloids this provides entertainment: one widely available paper, Sovershenno ...”

“... technique, told him to stop, because if he was any good he’d be terrible. Artists themselves may want to keep their innocence for all sorts of reasons: pleasure in detailing facts lost in more sophisticated representations, in making patterns out of things (the flower-beds in the two Rousseau full-length portraits of women in the exhibition are set out ...”