“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seems to say that by the crap we make and eat, by the way we look, dress and enjoy ourselves you may know us for being less than we might ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... formation, must wait for unpredictable shifts in scholarly taste. Then an unexploited deposit may become a cultural ore worth mining.‘Curios’, Wellcome called them: things made (masks, spears, microscopes, instruments, whole pharmacies); parts of people (a bit of Jeremy Bentham’s skin, strands of George III’s hair, mummies, brains and the odd hand ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”