“... What on earth, you ask, is a scarith? Well, it is a sort of mud-piecrust package, which may be tubular in shape, containing in various layers documents of immense antiquity. What language is the word from? Apparently from ancient Etruscan, or Hetruscan, if stories about the grandeur of the Tuscan kingdom up to the time of Lars Porsena of Clusium are to be believed ...”

“... enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heavens gate, Built in Jerusalems wall. The great Northrop Frye, in ...”

“... showing white teeth – the faces of mummies shrink into similar smiles and grimaces. Her eyelids may droop heavily or be closed. She, and her less explicitly characterised sisters, are mostly skinny, but wide-hipped. When they are naked they are often standing in frontal poses in which pubic hair is strongly accented. In some portraits – those of Rose von ...”

“... poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret. The party, to judge by what was said in the hall, has changed; and for the better. But it hasn’t changed enough, and the danger is that where there used to be nastiness there will now be confusion. The effect of three successive electoral ...”

“... when we first see him, and obviously likes the media attention far more than he likes his job. He may think this is his job. There is a good deal of faux film-footage dotted about the movie, as if we were watching a documentary based on dozens of scraps of other people’s documentaries. Historians and sociologists, entirely reasonable people, speak directly ...”

“... the same as it always was. By attempting to swallow Ukip whole and ingest its voters, Theresa May is banking on a similar attitude from Brexit supporters: that their insistence on the forms and legalities of British independence from the foreign usurpers of Brussels will be matched by a willingness to overlook the extent to which Britain has become a ...”

“... noticed at all. ‘We’ are black people in America and especially in the South; but the word may also call up everyone involved in the history and mythology of these matters, that is, most of us. If we learn how some people ‘have come to be seen’, we may learn something too about how we are ...”

“... black police officer. The pictured times move from the 19th century to the 1950s to the 1970s. We may not have recognised the first shot as coming from Gone with the Wind, but we’ll certainly have picked up the presentation of the American South and the Civil War. As for the connections among the three scenes, we’re still waiting for the film to start and ...”

“... a man whose hair has been carefully uncombed before almost every appearance he makes. But then we may feel that both men are equally helpless in these digital times: cool smiles and scruffy bewilderment carry the same message. The French word for digital – numérique – is repeated again and again in the movie, and it carries implications that are very ...”

“... she’ll be, what, eight months old now? Mitchell’s face freezes, looks briefly as though it may never move again. Then he returns to an imitation of normality. Hoover has a question about the little girl, or about her future incarnation. ‘What will you do when she brings home a negro?’ Mitchell doesn’t have an answer to the question, and perhaps ...”

“... cult of celebrity which reaches its early maturity in Reynolds’s work, those first responses may also be our last.Celebrity portraits may have another more profound, or at least more dignified life as works of art, but our problem when we look at them in that way is the encroachment of the publicity images which ...”

“... picture. It was probably Gainsborough’s friend Philip Thicknesse who wrote that his ‘pictures may not be said so properly to be like the originals as to be the people themselves’, and similar remarks were made about La Tour’s pastels. The critical language would be equally appropriate for a piece of legerdemain – which was, in a way, what the use of ...”

“... The self is not a world. If we don’t like this moral, or don’t believe in it, then we may want to reflect on the gap between the personal stories at the seaside and the impersonal disaster of the climate – which here plays the role of catastrophic history in other Petzold movies. The gap makes all serious connection implausible, but how can we ...”

“... is less of being in command than of being in pursuit.Once the hand leaves off, the marked surface may serve as a step in an inquiry or at least a historical record. We discard the sensation that originally held us gripped. Reversing that drift, the exhibition Drawing the Unspeakable at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne (until 27 April) points us back to mark ...”

“... of whom? Of the executive, certainly; of the parties to the dispute; of external pressures which may distort judgment; of personal biases: and no doubt of more besides. The Universal Declaration on the Independence of Justice adopted in Montreal in 1983 asserts: ‘Judges individually shall be free, and it shall be their duty, to decide matters before them ...”