“... The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months after Millais’s death: ‘a finer promise than any artist of his time’ was wasted. His later pictures were done ...”

“... oak beams, leaded window panes and small discs of bottled glass.’ The details in the black and white line drawings are wonderfully precise: not just of mouldings, doors and table ornaments, but of inhabitants too. That the furniture in ‘20th-Century Functional’ (bent plywood, Aalto perhaps) and the Bauhaus light fitting should be correct is good ...”

“... engine – a cartoonish swing. Abstract Expressionist swipes at the stone with a resist make wild white marks on a black ground in a print by Emerson Woelffer from 1951. The black and white woodcuts produced in Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries and the coloured ones made in Japan in the 18th and 19th display formidable ...”

“... them you will note the toothed outlines of the leaves among the yellow flowers, and the black and white cat in the shade. These are uncomposed pictures, very unlike the perspective of vines. You cannot even see what they represent unless you spend a little time peering into them. That is another thing paintings do: they control the speed and direction of the ...”

“... August), there are many examples of that freshness: two of the most famous, Thomas Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea and Turner’s Blue Rigi, hang side by side. There is also Bonington’s view of the Piazza dell’Erbe in Verona, which gives a sense of moving crowds and shifting light that makes Canaletto’s Venetian crowds and calm yellow sunshine ...”

“... upon the threshold dressed in a crêpe of a kind of violent blue with desultory clusters of white roses. For some ten minutes Mason had the pleasure of being witness of that series of pretty movements and preparations with which women in full dress beguile the interval before their carriage is announced; their glances at the mirror, their slow ...”

“... in Restoration portraiture. LaChapelle’s shot of the actress Drew Barrymore in a pink and white waitress’s uniform and carefully laddered stockings, surrounded by half grapefruits, each with a cherry on top, echoing the nipple of her exposed breast, is iconographically not too far from some of Lely’s portraits.Versace does not go quite so far and ...”

“... clean clothes, but within that simple desire lie images of crisp starching, of linen whiter than white. Advertising suggests imagined outcomes. Lever’s description of a rose-wreathed cottage stands to the housing he had built as the little girl in her white frock does to the daily wash.So when one finds among the ...”

“... MIDLAND BANK – is still carved into the rusticated stonework by the entrance, while the red and white diapers of HSBC are hung out to catch the eye) and palimpsests (in Fleet Street you can still read ‘National Westminster’ on the granite, under the perkier ‘Natwest’). Badging is, of course, much cheaper and easier to apply than a deeper ...”

“... it spreads over the entire wall – transformed not just in scale, but in colour, from blue on white to blue on red. It is still to be seen in photographs of his studio taken in 1946. The fabrics and costumes he collected were neither an aesthetically coherent group nor intrinsically fine: their value lay in the uses he found for them. That they attracted ...”

“... steps to articulate the greenery (which, because his photographs, like Smith’s, are in black and white, is not green at all). While water and sculpture are picked up by painters and photographers, they are not needed urgently in a real garden. The experience of walking along a big herbaceous border, taking in the complicated plant relationships one by ...”

“... and clips from Hollywood gangster movies in which the photography is high-contrast black and white, best set the scene for his paintings. The paintings of George Bellows, say, who earlier recorded the look of urban America, do not imply narratives in the way Hopper’s do. His magazine illustrations and the drawings he made for his paintings have much in ...”

“... a prescription for public policy, made on the understanding that something could be done. Men in white coats should be given the funds to get back to their laboratories and defeat Aids. And ‘ought’ in the sense that we had a particular duty to a persecuted group. As well as the practical, good-housekeeping kind of ‘ought’ there was an ...”

“... to take my blood pressure when, an hour or so from landing, the cabin lights came up and the hard white light reflected from clouds below was allowed to shine through. Breakfast was on its way. This blast of light was a prelude to the bright, bright light of home. It is not just imagination that tells you there is more of the stuff out there. Fugitive magenta ...”

“... a beach but also how, if the colour and mistiness where sky meets the horizon are right, and a few white streaks of surf adroitly placed, the graduated ribbon of blue on the canvas can still stand for the immensity of the ocean. In views like these, where interest is centred on the far middle distance, there was still the problem of what to do with wide strips ...”