“... been formed by Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro of 1764, may feel momentarily taken aback, but in essence nothing has changed for the palace is not in the city, the city is in the palace and it has been there, growing and adapting, for more than a thousand years. A washing line at the palace. Diocletian died in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... threatening glances with a passer-by. In Vancouver in 1982, when the picture was taken, it may have been more blindingly obvious that (as Wall relates it) the man’s reflexive gesture constituted racial abuse. Mimicry: a white trash white man mimics an Asian man’s eyes, repeating a gesture that lingers in the culture. But the picture is more dynamic ...”

“... the way Buckley is heading, although the success of the first three books – all best-sellers – may incline him to stick with what he has got. Does Who’s on first portray espionage as it really is? I think so. (I am about to give away the ending, so anyone who plans to read the book should stop here.) Oakes kidnaps the Russian scientist and gets from him ...”

“... Man with a Turban (1629), on display at Turning Heads at the National Gallery of Ireland (until 26 May), is contemplative rather than active.Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions. In a self-portrait of c.1635, his features are ...”

“... man who gets involved in advertising when he wants to be a journalist.’ She was writing Frost in May. It was tough competition, but he was to have his own successes as a writer of stories. The lunch where Nika Hulton, Edward’s super-managerial Russian wife, launched her frontal attack is a set-piece to make defenders of proprietors’ rights think ...”

“... as W.J. Bate has recently shown, is not borne out by the facts.’ This happy unanimity may indeed have been achieved within Harvard Graduate School, but over the rest of the globe no one is quite sure. Bate does have two searching pages on the padlock: but the ‘facts’ are by no means self-evident in their nature or in their bearing. Bate says ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... railway in Yunnan. The term bandit is vague. In sufficiently remote districts a ‘bandit’ may consider himself a member of the local gentry, receiving rents. The presence of non-Chinese tribesmen in the hills rather complicated the problem for us; some students believed that these people needed a severed head for the autumn sowing, which was very ...”

“... Clutch my hand.        Stay with me. The fields are mined by the enemy. Tell me we may be friends again. Far from the wisdom of the blood I saw a child reach from the mud.        Clutch my hand.        Clutch my heart. The fields are mined and the moon is dark. The Blue Vein River is in full flood. Far from the wisdom of the ...”

“... 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 ...”