“... sucked with us into the vacuum-cleaner bag the open road is. Quick, tell me a story that I may repeat it with minor variations and the job be over. Rakes and shovels lean beside the open door this evening with a special lustre all their own, that they can’t know. And I, I was spirited away by a handsome enchanter to a medium-sized city not twenty ...”

“... all make the journey to discover ourselves in our personal histories, and that when we set out we may need a myth to travel by. Ryman begins with the history of Dorothy Gael, whose father has absconded, whose mother has died of diphtheria, and who has been sent as a child, with no companion other than her dog Toto, to live in Kansas, in ...”

“... but they have been found in the depths near France, Portugal, Scotland. Scientists say they may be everywhere the ocean goes deep and cold: they could be far closer to us than we think.I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through ...”

“... And yet what Anthill actually demonstrates is the precise opposite. Wilson’s human characters may exhibit antlike behaviour, but that proves nothing because they’re so unlike real human beings. While his ants – and this is a rare and marvellous achievement – are absolutely nothing like people ...”

“... loves the horses and hates the fact that he has to sell them. He thinks he understands them and he may be right. But then the whole film, as its opening suggests, is about the unreliability of what we think, and even more perhaps about our tendency to think mainly in clichés, so that all creatures, in our minds, become caricatures of nature. ‘Every animal ...”

“... course we know that we’re seeing images in both cases, and the implication that the characters may never be more than images to each other is clear. But something else is happening to the idea of visual knowledge and to other sorts of understanding.There were good reasons to be suspicious of Seo-rae. She didn’t seem much upset by her husband’s ...”

“... his most profound about animals: 7 July 86. Chickens are always bad-tempered and ungracious. 8 May 87. The chicks outside: at a certain age the adolescent males start trampling their mother. How does she feel? Proud? The entries appear in meticulous small script, very rarely crossed out, all neatly dated. They are not the observations of a writer who ...”

“... though an older ‘white teacher, teaching at a black school, who’s sick of these guys – that may be one whom you’d accept’. He says that ‘young black women are very bad – there’s an antagonism’, though older black men, particularly if they were raised in the South, ‘where there’s respect for law and order’, often do just fine. You ...”

“... in the centre nude men bravely advance towards the incomparable paintings in the Great Room. It may be a primordial scene, but it is also a testimony to the primitive power of painting and to the modern artist’s view of where painting ...”

“... in the personal insurance division – I was both taken aback and adamant. Absolutely not. I may have also been a little touched by the suggestion. I hope I was. He was asking me to follow in his footsteps, after all. But personal insurance was the women’s side of the game. My father, like the other men in the executive suite, negotiated insurance for ...”

“... fittings designed by Bauhaus graduates could be slipped unnoticed among those on sale at Ikea. We may not turn on mass displays of gymnastics like those Rodchenko photographed, but health clubs and gyms proliferate. The fitted kitchen designed by Grete Lihotzky in 1926 for a Frankfurt housing project – it’s at the V&A – is, in its essentials, the same ...”

“... Horrendously complicated and expensive, liable to produce a range of perverse effects, it may nonetheless be a rational way of achieving a national ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions. Blair seems to like the idea of a household audit, but he’s unwilling to talk about real changes in the way we live. Sooner or later the whole lifestyle, including ...”

“... Stephen Dedalus travel by public transport on his way from the school in Dalkey?) Censuses may not give you the heart and soul of the country, that’s literature’s job, but they tell you the circumstances of the population on a given day, which might also be literature’s job, if you stick with Joyce. The census coming round is also cause for ...”

“... they must necessarily be a shadow, an echo or a critique. Tate Britain’s exhibition (until 18 May), drawn mostly from its own collection and gathered under the capacious heading of Ruin Lust, takes too little account of this. Beginning with Piranesi’s views of Rome it offers many fine things to look at, but the parts add up to an uneasy whole that ...”

“... is an extreme machine. As you go round the Science Museum’s new exhibition, Collider (until 5 May), you’re constantly reminded that it’s one of the biggest, fastest, coldest, deepest, most cleverly engineered and most expensive things ever made. It consists of two parallel hoop-shaped pipes, 27km long – almost as long as the Boulevard Périphérique ...”