“... have normal life.’ The racist mood in Israel absolves the government from any inhibitions that may have restricted its actions in the past. Now ecologists, industrialists and academics have been drafted in. The Jewish National Fund is behind the initiative, along with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. The aim of diminishing the ...”

“... marine blues win out. The choice of words seems to indicate the attitude. ‘Arenas for freedom’ may have been the phrase ideologues liked to reach for in the heyday of British abstraction. But what they really meant was pastorals: glorious, gratuitous ...”

“... Who can see the green earth any moreAs she was by the sources of Time?Who imagines her fields as they layIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?Matthew Arnold, ‘The Future’Barley field, cut, dried,Brewed, poured, you’re so garrulousLong after you’ve gone.Old English riddle from the Exeter Book                    I                        1What rutting beast snorts‘Let me give you some pointers’Then trots through the mist?                        2In the beginningWas the Word, and the Word wasParsed into creatures ...”

“... not wholes – but rather of time and gravity on bodily form. From these commitments emerge what may be her most expressive sculptures, a group of teardrop-shaped plaster pendants that resulted from a process she called ‘gravistimulated casting’. It’s not difficult to work out what this means, or why a sculptor so interested in nature should conjure ...”

“... like an 8mm geography-lesson module from the 1960s.)Yet the suspicion that everything on display may one way or another be thought of as ‘art’ is carefully – and brilliantly – allowed to linger in the visitor’s mind. Mack and his colleagues had already managed this in the Museum of Mankind with their later acquisitions (only intermittently ...”

“... work. We are encouraged to carry the process begun by the painter to a conclusion of our own. It may be richer and will certainly be more personal than any a resolved finish could achieve. The innate vitality and productive ambiguity of the marks on the canvas mediated a modern way of looking. Drawings and sketches had always given connoisseurs the thrill of ...”

“... a pleasing seal-like sleekness – the wrinkled, or pale northerners, pink or sunblock-pallid, may feel the need to cover up.As we sat at a Paris café table, the most striking passing figure was an old woman – thin to the point of emaciation. At every shop window she checked out her reflection and her several diaphanous layers of bold, floral-printed ...”

“... were replaced with standard gauge in 1892. (In one weekend – from daybreak on Saturday, 21 May to 4 a.m. on the Monday – 4200 workers converted 171 route miles of the main line. The Monday mail train ran on time.) But Brunel’s decision to specify something bigger, better or more daring than the norm was logical, not hubristic: he believed it would ...”

“... the benefits which sometimes follow a war – the NHS has its own show cabinet. At this point you may begin to feel a dissonance between the building and its use: to find that the rhetoric of the architecture and of the sound and light show which justifies its darkness, scale and arrangement is out of step with the dispassionate analysis of war and of the ...”

“... Stanton De Priest for taking his wife to a White House tea: ‘That burr-headed wife of De Priest may be good enough for Mrs Herbert Hoover, but I’ll tell you here and now that she’s not good enough for you.’ Keener on sniffing out communists than Nazis, he focused his most intense investigations on the scripts of the Federal Theatre. A fellow ...”

“... beautiful, fact-crammed catalogue accompanying the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition (until 25 May) explains that the malo loloa, a long loincloth made of barkcloth, was a metaphor for Hawaii forming alliances. When, just over two hundred years ago, the young King Liholiho (known as Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu sailed from Hawaii to Britain, seeking ...”

“... a twin ticket is retained. The number of actual carpet coupons for the block is four: a block may contain sixty flats. Once all the tickets are distributed, there is a draw and the lucky ones get the coupons. Then the market takes over. Those who get the coupons and do not want a carpet get on the phone to make deals with those who do – or who know a ...”

“... further stimulates the industry of producing statistics and the work of arguing about what they may mean. Hacking insists that the nation states’ massive reliance on numbers was the necessary precondition for advances in statistical theory. Modern industrial society was the only platform from which the new style of reasoning could have emerged. It is ...”

“... and steel. He had warned the Labour Government that ‘by standing aside form the discussions, we may be taking a very great risk with our economy – a very great risk indeed.’ He had pointed out how important it was to be in at the formative stages, when the structure could be moulded. ‘Now we may be left with the ...”

“... collapsed and was nationalised) being darkly responsible for Madam’s guilty silence. There may be something to this but the larger truth is surely that the culture of the House of Commons, and thus of our political life in general, is determined not, as in the case of Congress or the Bundestag, by its committees, but by meetings of the whole ...”