“... the British Museum at the beginning of this year as you would your own in a magnifying mirror. You may be disgusted by the enlargement as Gulliver was by the huge girls of Brobdingnag: ‘their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured’, with moles ‘as broad as a trencher’. But the Lilliputian can be creepy too: think yourself a giant ...”

“... hedges disappear or get thinner. Around farm buildings trees imply shelter, and whereas farming may generally reduce the number of species, tree planting increases it. In France, a country where trees in public places, even along roads, tend to be under strict management, more part of the architecture than a contrast to it, formality distinguishes town from ...”

“... until 2010, followed by five years as Miliband’s shadow chancellor, before losing his seat last May aged 48. His defeat, announced at 7 a.m., was the perfect conclusion to Labour’s terrible night: the man the polls predicted would be setting the next Budget was instead out on his ear. Now, a year on, in addition to becoming a lecturer at Harvard and ...”

“... just as we see the details that only enlargements make possible. We live outside our perceptions, may be one suggestion we take from these phenomena. And another might be that precisely because movies seem to offer us such an overload of information of all sorts, because the information is in certain ways irrefutable, film is the ideal medium for reminding us ...”

“... but following close on the insurrection and instability of 1808-14 the exhibition suggests it may have influenced the atmosphere of Goya’s Tauromaquia, especially coming, as it does, so soon after his earlier sequence, Los Desastres de la Guerra. Cornelius’s drawings for engravings on the subject of Goethe’s Faust were finished by 1811, so it’s ...”

“... non-chaos. Practically, it offered stability to a skeletal structure of this height.All this may sound obvious, but, as every beginner must learn, each step on the way to a finished sculpture needs thinking through. Alongside the sketches for one of her most elaborate pieces, a long wall-hung relief titled Sans II (1968), Hesse made a list of the ...”

“... tower was added is now less interesting than a photograph of the finished building – though it may well have been useful for the client. One of the Futurist architect Sant’Elia’s sketches of ziggurat-like blocks is a reminder of how little you have to build to gain a reputation and be an influence: he was only 28 when he died fighting in 1916. He was ...”

“... exhibition Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (at Tate Britain until 11 May). It makes it easier to relish the dramatics of Horace Vernet’s Mazeppa, to see that there is more than nice observation of weather in Paul Huet’s picture of a lonely rider, Storm at the End of the Day.Dumas’s novel mixes operatic themes with the odd ...”

“... interesting, but do nothing to assuage a kind of disgust at seeing such sorrow made so smart. It may be akin to Mikhailov’s own disgust at the situation he records. We now see so much, and know so much about how what we see can be adjusted to engage our attention, that no presentation of Mikhailov’s sort of truth can ever seem simple again. Only the ...”

“... across the Jumna. Our own world, shadowed on the miles of film passing through our cameras, may, despite being so voluminously recorded, turn out to have been less well ...”

“... I can’t say that I’ve ever had a strong opinion – or any opinion – about Sean Penn. I may have watched a film he was in, and I booked but didn’t get as far as the cinema to see The Tree of Life. In future, I’ll be hanging on his every word. He finds Britain ‘colonialist, ludicrous and archaic’ for hanging on to the Malvinas, and refusing to try and come to an agreement with Argentina ...”

“... for an audience newly exposed to it as abstraction would be later.When you abandon stories you may still have a message. The aspects of nature that dwarf us can suggest other powers beyond our grasp. In Russia, pictures of plains and forests, snow, sun and thaw, were evocations of the motherland. The emotions they played on were consonant, at least ...”

“... Compare it with the 19th-century rooms at the Tate: there models are all around you. But while you may know that Elizabeth Siddal sat, or rather floated, for Millais’s Ophelia, her name is not in the title. Artists’ models, like fashion photographers’ models, are assumed to have been so far transformed as to have no personal claim on the image. But a ...”

“... have taken in the details of any one figure – the way the angled holes cut into the boxes (they may remind you of the windows in Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel); the threaded boss in the top of the top box (which could be there to fix a hook to make it easier to move); the serial numbers stamped on each body-box (which are unsettling) – and once you ...”

“... on, ‘has all the marks of a game of displacement based clearly on an appreciation of kitsch. It may well be that the work, more than simply a portrait, is actually a brilliant inquiry into taste.’ Looking at the picture doesn’t make this more convincing and, as far as I can make out, Vuillard’s journal entries do nothing to bear it out. The entries ...”