“... portraits, some of the finest of which are included in the National Gallery exhibition (until 19 May), including the very finest of all, Francesco Maria II della Rovere from the Uffizi. Self-portrait, c.1595-1600. According to his early biographers he was forced to leave Rome because of ill health, which some attributed to the results of attempted ...”

“... photographs in a recipe book, that it is too good to be true. This is a pin-up of a lobster. It may look lovely, but it’s not really meant to be eaten. It rouses only to disappoint. Two hundred years later Courbet, whose paintings of women, dead fish, game and fruit (particularly apples) are all insistently fleshly, takes food out of the ‘look but ...”

“... of Hong Kong), which had an analysis of Hu Jintao’s big speech to the congress. Since China may well be approaching a moment of economic, environmental and political crisis, this has a claim to being the most important political speech anywhere in the world this year. The trouble is that these speeches are in code. Also, since Mao, China’s leaders ...”

“... will have died out before the weather warms and the midges start biting again. If it does, it may join the other imported insect-borne diseases that have failed to establish themselves in the UK. The copper ore-carrying sailing ship Hecla brought Aedes aegypti mosquitoes infected with yellow fever virus from Cuba to Swansea in 1865. It docked on 9 ...”

“... paintings of the 1990s are just that. In pictures of winter weather from the 1990s blobs of snow may spatter the air, obscuring a scene. Reflections on ice and the bare branches of trees create patterns that slow your reading. On some, seen close to, you find a sparse scattering of little blobs of bright colour like bits of chopped up cherry in a cake mix ...”

“... The next image is from 1970. Hamilton set up a camera in front of his television for a week in May. The events at Kent State University – the shooting of student protesters by Ohio National Guardsmen – were in the news that week, and he made several exposures, choosing one showing a blurry shape. Cued by the title, Kent State, we soon identify the ...”

“... no relation to the treaty organisation – and is frustratingly hard to get hold of. This may be deliberate. Not only does it lay bare the deep strategic thinking behind Putin’s remarkable art of martial diplomacy – teaching a lesson from which his sparring partners Bush and Blair could learn a thing or two – but it is also a brilliant judo ...”

“... the Herut Party (today’s Likud) was far from power and its members were considered outsiders. It may be that as he ascended the political ladder, the possibilities were just too intoxicating. And when an American ‘exile Jew’ (a contemptuous term for Jews outside Israel), a professional schnorrer, who considered it a great honour to support him, offered ...”

“... secure crisis management environment” whose name is in the public domain but to which we may not refer’. The only clues: it ‘lies below ground to a depth of five floors, somewhere in Central London’. I’m only guessing, but that ought to make it the facility known as PINDAR, which lurks beneath the MoD itself and was built between 1987 and ...”

“... Massad are interested not so much in individual academics as in university administrations, which may as a result feel pressured to respond in a conciliatory way, as the University of North Carolina did. At Columbia, the response has been dramatic. According to the minutes of a faculty meeting last October, Bollinger – who has been criticised by some ...”

“... any reader of Milton’s masque will recognise. The unspeakable adventure of the early Lorna may seem unfamiliar to some who know her only as a brilliant critic of contemporary women’s writing or the author of an extraordinary memoir about a rural childhood. The early Lorna was a passionate Renaissance and 17th-century scholar, and this training ...”

“... Limerick, who was shot the day after Boxing Day 1915, near Salonica. Officially he was 19, but he may well have lied about his age to get into the forces. He was shot for refusing to fall in for a fatigue and then to put on his hat. The fatigue, apparently, was part of Field Punishment No 1, visited on Downey for ‘insubordination’. Field Punishment No 1 ...”

“... in which, notably Iraq, he is of course deeply complicit. And while we all know he’s clever, he may also feel the need to demonstrate that he’s likeable, or at least that he’s a member of the human race. Alas for the result. Along with every other justified accusation, the most depressing thing of all about New Labour has been its sheer platitudinous ...”

“... often and nervously, with the memory of an expanding and contracting shadow, although that memory may be an overlay, an extrapolation from things seen since such as the MRI scans in the Heart exhibition – at the Wellcome until 16 September. As much about the heart in the mind as about the heart in the body, the exhibition encourages introspection. A series ...”

“... warned that unless other European governments move quickly to boost their economies, they may find themselves facing similar unrest. New Democracy, the centre-right party led by Costas Karamanlis, came to power four years ago, promising to ‘reinvent’ the state, root out corruption and launch educational reform. Today the state is still in the ...”