“... young photographers from Japan were taking pictures of other young photographers from Japan. It may be pretty ordinary to most children now – who all have paparazzi for parents – but I was still taken aback to see the scrum around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... experi-   ences déjà vu. She’s drawing blood, sucking up bodily     fluids wherever they may be. Lestat goes underground   in New Zealand, where once again he proceeds to push his portfolio. Marius subsequently subdues Lestat (Tom Cruise), and   takes him to the Samoan islands where Akasha and Kim     Dotcom sit as statues. Big Time. Face to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but thereafter the indoctrination of all Ultra recipients, with a few possible exceptions which may have included General Freyberg in Crete, included, as the word implies, a full explanation of the nature of the beast. If the cover device still continued in use for some time for the dissemination of Ultra, it did so chiefly for the purposes of security in ...”

“... 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 ...”