“... the saint about her. The variations put you in the presence of a crowd – that of the makers. It may be that Henner’s image was chosen as a source because the face fitted some common notion of beauty. It may also have been chosen because it offered those who acquired the images comfort in tribulation ...”

“... Admiralty, it depicts him sitting on a bulldog and holding a battleship over the inscription, ‘May God defend the Right.’ One point on which most of these very diverse artists agreed was that the raw material was unpromising. The New Zealander David Low, who became Churchill’s favourite cartoonist, first met him in 1922 and sized him up with a ...”

“... them. ‘Paralysed with shyness,’ Bennett writes, Mary-Kay ‘told him it didn’t matter (and may even have said that she didn’t matter). Tiresomely, this gilded fly persisted, still wanting her name. “Oh, skip it,” she snapped, whereupon the flunkey announced: “Mr Timothy Binyon and Miss Skippit.”’ The wish to be noticed and not noticed (and ...”

“... historical building, transporting it across the ocean and recreating it in an institution may seem anachronistic, even reckless. But the architectural ethos behind the house is conducive to such a process. Both Japanese and West Coast architects knew how to build resilience into their homes. Buildings like the Yokoi house were designed with the ...”

“... cinema. It is based on the first in the series, The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), so we may be witnessing the beginning of a beautiful relationship. In spite of the obvious, the film isn’t really about detection. It is about survival and rescue. It’s also about our relation to the heroine, because she talks to the camera a lot. ‘Wouldn’t ...”

“... Such a view underestimates how much a well-filmed face or gesture can say, not recognising that it may in fact say exactly what the words were saying, and say it better. A great example of this possibility is Visconti’s sustained reading of Dirk Bogarde’s face in Death in Venice, but there are some good moments in Romeo and Juliet too. I’m thinking ...”

“... a warm, amusing, dancing person. Arabuli manages both roles and the transition wonderfully. People may disappear in Istanbul, but Akin’s film suggests they reappear in other guises, more tolerant and humane than the ones they grew up with. Lia finally concedes that Tekla didn’t fail her family, they failed her. ‘We only cared about what people would say ...”

“... Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has taken a while to reach us. Its premiere was at Cannes in May 2023. The fate of the film imitates, in a way, its main theme. It’s about getting lost, or not getting lost enough. It has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t think of another word to describe them ...”

“... of the body of Jeffrey Miller, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in May 1970, with a pool of blood in the foreground. Kennard’s dyeline print bled red ink in the rain. He soon became a regular contributor to radical papers and magazines; the exhibition includes pages from the New Statesman, Socialist Challenge and ...”

“... on the distant view of Miss Provis at her easel, her peacock train supported by naked graces. You may well recognise Reynolds in the foreground, rising from the grave with his ear trumpet, but you should also know that Edward Malone, his biographer, said that, were he alive, Reynolds would have subscribed to Miss Provis’s method. The flying, farting putto ...”

“... ovens, or Höss’s later promotion to commandant of commandants, but the possibility that Hedwig may have to leave the house (and garden and greenhouse) she loves so much. This is when we see Höss staring across the river again. His promotion requires the family to leave Poland and move to Oranienburg, near Berlin. It takes a week before he can bring ...”

“... uncalled for in the days of the painted portrait – dark glasses or a raised newspaper – may be thrown up. Privacy laws could change things, but for many years celebrities have fought attacks on the integrity of the image with yet more pictures of the approved kind.Photographers who can produce them – who can make faces interesting and desirable ...”

“... politics, but it does surely mean that art has an urgent, exclusive attraction for her that it may not have for the rest of us, who like it but don’t live it. Another interesting moment in the film is less forgiving in this respect, but powerful all the same, carrying a message that may not be as simple as it ...”

“... looking for the ancient gifts of the dead to the living, without any concern for what the living may do with them, he now moves towards a religious respect for privacy – of the dead or anyone else. This could be because he thinks that he and Flora are the only people who have any right to worry about whether Beniamina is dead or not. It could also be the ...”

“... says. ‘Not about God. Never about God. What he had lost his faith in was the Church.’ He may have lost a few other moral assets too, since we also learn that he conspired to discredit one of the likely candidates in the election that would take place after his death. He fired another potential successor in his last hours, too late for the dismissal ...”