“... Portraits – likenesses of living persons – began to appear in China about 2500 years ago. The tradition may be long, but the breadth and scale of the genre are even more striking, especially when portraiture is asked to perform broader duties than the depiction of people. The portrait of a continent is not the same as the portrait of a lady, say, and neither is a ‘portrait of the times’, the title of a vast and dazzling exhibition of contemporary Chinese art – around 120 artists and several hundred works – at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (until 10 November), a former power plant in Pudong on the banks of the river ...”

“... The​ South African labour market,’ Charles van Onselen writes in New Nineveh, ‘has always been dominated by … mining, agriculture and domestic service.’ Van Onselen’s two-volume history of ‘everyday life in the Witwatersrand’, a long ridge on the Highveld, explores the period from the mid-1880s when the discovery of gold propelled South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years ...”

“... The​ photographer Sanlé Sory was born in the 1940s in French West Africa. At independence in 1960 he became a ‘Voltaic’, or a citizen of Haute Volta, and in 1984, a ‘Burkinabe’: the new head of state, Thomas Sankara, had combined two non-colonial languages to rename Haute Volta as Burkina Faso, ‘the land of the upright’. By then Sory’s work had consigned him to the land of the slightly stooped, gazing through the viewfinder or bent over the developing tray, even though in his self-portraits he is a paragon of ‘uprightness’, short and muscular, with an obvious liking for the gym ...”

“... Fifteen​ years ago I was asked by a young Palestinian student at a meeting in Jenin whether, as a British subject, I felt responsible for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Perhaps it was the translator who introduced the idea of personal responsibility, when the young woman who put the question meant historical. In any case, that’s how I remember hearing it and thinking that I was off the hook – no one in that room was alive in Balfour’s day or indeed in 1948 ...”

“... Don​ McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain (until 6 May) is proof that it pays for a photojournalist covering victims of conflict and hardship to get up close: not quite eyeball to eyeball, but near enough to suggest a portrait. Most of McCullin’s photographs ask us to look frankly at the human face, and often our gaze is reciprocated. Even a dead soldier with the North Vietnamese Army, killed during the Battle of Hue in 1968, seems to want to get us into focus through his half-closed eyes ...”

“... The​ commune of Poilley in Brittany is fifteen minutes by car from the coast, but in Madeleine de Sinéty’s photographs we imagine a village miles from a beach or a harbour and further still from Rennes, the regional capital. Sinéty discovered Poilley by chance in the early 1970s. She had been on holiday, and heading to Paris, where she worked as a magazine illustrator – for Marie-Claire, among others ...”

“... English whimsy had a good run for its money in the 1960s. Pop culture hoovered it up and began to mass-produce it in a variety of forms. It’s odd now to remember how it looked on the hoardings and billboards and store ads: the posters of girls whose tresses became rivers; the Medusa-like transfigurations of our rock idols, those tousled Monica Lewinskies with hair on their chests ...”

“... When​ Donald Trump pledged, during his presidential campaign, to ‘begin building a wall’ along the US-Mexican border he was promising to create something that already existed. At the time, more than one third of the border was fortified, in some parts with a single wall, elsewhere with two or even three layers. Work had begun on a deterrent barrier during Bill Clinton’s presidency, but it was limited and ineffectual: the border is roughly 2000 miles in total, Clinton’s wall covered 325 ...”

“... I heard a few bars of Chris Corner’s song ‘I Salute You Christopher’ a day or so before the new IAMX album, Volatile Times, was released. The song, which appears on the album, is subtitled ‘Ode to Christopher Hitchens’: I salute you Christopher I salute your life How you played the dice … That ‘played’, in the past tense, has the ring of a funeral bell and a cracked one at that ...”

“... Not many people have the good fortune to die well, and fewer still to live well, but by all accounts Wolde-ab Wolde Mariam managed the first as respectably as he had the second. He died in May at the age of 87 in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, which became the 52nd sovereign state in Africa two years ago. Wolde-ab was buried in the cemetery of Tsetserat and a day of national mourning was declared ...”

“... There were 245 detainees at Camp Delta in Guantánamo when President Obama was sworn in this year and there are now about 220. When Guantánamo is mothballed, as he wants, some 80 of those will get asylum in a third country or find themselves repatriated. The US administration aims to prosecute around 60 others and hold the rest indefinitely, because they can’t be brought to trial – the evidence against them is flawed, often by harsh interrogation methods – or because it’s thought too dangerous to release them ...”

“... The most recent​ of William Kentridge’s works on display in Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery (until 15 January) is called Right into Her Arms. It’s also one of the best. A raised stage, three metres long, about a metre high, is dressed with a flimsy backdrop of beige, brown, grey; here and there are torn swatches of yellow, green and maroon ...”

“... The idea that a falling object was about to defy gravity before it hit the ground is a familiar one in the mythology of the pop idol. It is the gist of Charles Shaar Murray’s book about Jimi Hendrix, who enjoyed a great career as a virtuoso guitar player between 1966 and 1970, when he died in a London hospital after an overdose of sleeping pills. In a sparkling homage, far more readable than most books about pop music, Murray argues that the extravagant left-hander who introduced a new vocabulary to rock guitar-playing was the unsung progenitor of a jazz we will never know ...”

“... The Police Athletic League building stands on a large, unkempt lot in Atlantic City. It is a forlorn edifice with damp walls and a cracked facade. Carl ‘The Truth’ Williams, who fought Mike Tyson in July, is a regular visitor to the boxing gym on the upper floor, where the athletic young men – mostly black and Hispanic – spar in a raised ring, thrash oblong leather bags, pump metal, skip rope, and stalk their own images in three or four large mirrors, with a fury that must be reducing the life of the building still further ...”

“... Ahmed is a Palestinian living in the Bethlehem area. He is not yet thirty, but his studies were long ago interrupted by the closure of his university in the occupied territories and nowadays he earns part of his living by escorting foreign visitors around the West Bank. His itinerary is selective, leading from one dark scene of bereavement or injury to another ...”