“... nor can I be sure a canvas will have the same effect at different times. The black, grey and white images, some on bare canvas, are the ones which most often become significant – the ones I would say were beautiful if I didn’t feel the need for a word which takes more account of the energy they generate. Some of that energy comes from the placing and ...”

“... to something that exists only in the mind. What is the ‘real’ colour of an object that looks white by day, orange under a street light and pink through rose-tinted spectacles? However, the source of my own moments of disassociation is not, I think, epistemological but a by-product of time spent painting watercolours from life, an activity that has ...”

“... if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved. Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor of Bexhill who promoted ...”

“... and draws you in at the same time. You want to revisit it. For the rest, the transfer from the white-walled industrial spaces of Saatchi’s old galleries to this shell of vanished municipal authority makes some familiar works seem a bit less like Modern Art – which you are used to seeing in minimal spaces, well separated, isolated from the interference ...”

“... sits runs from corner to corner. A grille of some sort casts a grid of shadows over her face, her white dress, the bench and the boardwalk in front of her. In photographs like this – and in others of architecture, glassware, industrial machinery, even of gymnasts, swimmers and tall trees – rhythm and symmetry are abstracted from subject matter. The ...”

“... of Charles I to Henrietta Maria. In a recent essay (published in Past and Present, November 1983) Peter White has thrown the Tyacke thesis into question. He contends (as H.C. Porter has long done) that the pre-Laudian Church was never narrowly Calvinist. Yet at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their ...”

“... William Nicholson​ painted in white ducks and patent leather shoes. In photographs and caricatures his neat head sits on high white collars. He liked spotted shirts and fancy waistcoats. He was fun to be with but unrevealing about his art. His paintings and woodcuts give great pleasure; but no telling clumsiness draws us in: no impossible anatomy of the kind that makes Cézanne a challenge, none of the raw excitement of Expressionism, none of his son Ben’s abstract chill ...”

“... fanfare, like an elephant cry. At nightfall in this quarry a few kilometres outside Avignon, Peter Brook’s staging of Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of The Mahabharata begins. Wisdom-book and story-repository, fifteen times the size of the Bible, The Mahabharata was written in Sanskrit, but the words you hear are French, spoken with a piquant ...”

“... Walker. The photographs give the look of one corner of postwar Britain in documentary black and white. Eardley’s paintings give it in colour; bright patches of clothing show up against dark, chalk-scrawled walls. The turn 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 ...”

“... a bit below street level, comes closest to Gersaint’s openness. It is no longer new, but its white walls and the Constructivist gawkiness of the façade still fit exhibitions of work which is shy of being pinned down in terms of received meanings of the word ‘art’. The virtues of the building are sculptural as much as architectural – the architect ...”

“... are a more fantastical household. Her midnight-blue dress is seen through a starry maze of lace; a white cockatoo which she inspects with amusement sits on her raised hand. He, in a grey coat laced with gold, looks admiringly at her and holds his flute in the attitude of one who is about to play; he was probably a banker’s son. In 1769 Wright painted Mrs ...”

“... industrial subjects, in particular paintings of men at work: serious blocky pictures done in dirty white, grime, rust and verdigris. But it isn’t just in Clough’s work that the austerity of postwar Britain and France seems to have dimmed painters’ palettes: so much of the visual documentation of that time is in black and ...”

“... lower one. As it swings, the pointed tip of the bob cuts a shallow saucer shape out of something white: salt, perhaps (there is a lot of salt about), or wax. A yellow pen, less controlled than the plumb bob, wanders over a piece of paper that is blown about, from time to time, by a fan. The pen goes on trying to write. Plastic bottles, cut through ...”

“... more delicate – in some cases mannered. In the early Terese Andeszka the black and white pattern on the woman’s bikini is painted in strong black and white, and pleasure has been taken in the thickness and opacity of the white paint that outlines the figure on the ...”

“... Conseiller d’Etat Extraordinaire. His black uniform, brilliantly set off by the red ribbon and white enamel star of the Légion d’Honneur is tight, severe and exquisite; his thin-lipped face smug, perhaps, or arrogant. He represents political conservatism. Another man in black – Delacroix’s Louis-Auguste Schwiter – is the romantic opposition. His ...”