“... 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 ...”

“... except what colours to give the works we see on the walls of studios and apartments in black and white photographs. Those photographs themselves tell a little more. The living-rooms and workspaces look tight, and you can imagine impassioned arguments among groups sitting close together around crowded tables. At the end of the exhibition there is a ...”

“... shirts might be made from kimono lengths from Japan – elaborately printed silk or plain blue and white – or from big-patterned florals in English cotton, like the wrap-around pareus Gauguin’s Tahitian women wear. After that, locally designed – and locally printed – patterns, which might have the innocence of nursery wallpaper, the brilliance of ...”

“... he saw it figured in Singleton’s bent back, on the hot hillside protruding from beneath his white umbrella’. White umbrellas were regular kit for outdoor painters: you find them in, for example, Sargent’s picture of Monet at work, in photographs of Sargent himself on sketching excursions with friends, and in any ...”

“... on the lake is destroyed by the electric light on the shore. Kabuki theatre becomes crude when white faces and gaudy costumes are flooded with light. The force of Tanizaki’s elegy for the old is made the more powerful by his perception that the new is unavoidable: he describes the problems he had building a new house, how convenience and a modern taste ...”

“... simple geometry. The possible configurations of standard tubes and colours – even those of plain white ones – are in theory infinite. Although the point, once made, has limited interest, art-historical resonance will, for a while at least, sustain variations. For example, it adds interest to one series of Flavin arrangements of cool ...”

“... British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the backbench MP Miriam Cates, who blamed ‘cultural Marxism’ for declining birth ...”

“... are spaced out. On the gallery walls this flow of colour is interspersed with groups of black and white images.The first group consists of family snapshots from the first half of the last century, little deckle-edged album pictures of the kind most people have stuffed into an envelope or shoe box at the back of a drawer. Then there are panels of magazine ...”

“... public anger from the misrule of the military elite. Outside my bar, by contrast, stood two shiny white Nissan pick-ups with xenon headlamp racks and oversized alloy wheels. At first I thought they were aid-workers’ trucks, but NGOs demand spartan trim, and the laughter in this bar was coming from men wearing suits and talking on mobile phones. It seems ...”

“... of England (1949-55) – we see the first fruits of the appointment. It goes without saying that Peter Clarke’s volume is all his own, but it stands nonetheless in the shadow of the General Editor. Not only has Cannadine issued a prospectus to go with the new series, re-stating those views which supply the criteria by which it is to be measured, but ...”

“... effect of the pieces at Gagosian is more fanciful and stylish than critical. The gallery – high white rooms, attendants in black – is itself a bit Ballardian, and the works, like old pictures of St Anthony taunted by devils and caressed by sirens, offer the eye lubricious, melancholy or violent bait that you can take without finding when you do that you ...”

“... but incidental. Had Juan Martínez Montañés’s polychrome Christ on the Cross been made in white marble the sculpture might have been more beautiful, but would have been a further step away from reality and a less sure aid to a penitent following Ignatius Loyola’s instruction that meditations on personal sins should conclude with a dialogue between ...”

“... Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera ‘Robert le Diable’ the figures on stage are unfocused, ghostly white-sheeted nuns. They are broadly painted and form a pale band across the canvas; moonlight drifts through the round arches of the set; the strongest highlights are a splash of white seen through one of these, and glimpses ...”

“... blue-green, the night-time background blue, purple and brown. The apple green of her hat and its white flowers, her red hair, the chalky pallor of her long, thin face and her red, pursed lips are brightly theatrical, but her expression is contained, the gesture of hands clasped at her waist is ladylike. Unlike La Gouloue (La Gouloue at the Moulin Rouge is ...”

“... years pass, establish the piles of paper as being of their time is the large number of black and white photographic prints they contain. Black and white pictures – from Muybridge action sequences and Eisenstein film stills to the photographs he used as a basis for portraits – were a primary source for Bacon. The ...”