“... dress for themselves or for others was answered when the first shell turned into a brooch. It may be for status or sexual attraction, or to bribe the powers that be in the afterlife, but adornment always requires another’s eye, or the idea of another’s eye. Underwear, except in sexual circumstances when underwear is outerwear for the naked flesh, is ...”

“... Prospero threatens Caliban in The Tempest: ‘Urchins shall, for that vast of night that they may work, all exercise on thee.’ The sea urchin, then, takes its name from the hedgehog. Throughout history we have turned to the hedgehog: we have used them in our fables, and demanded that they cure us of our pains. In 1693 the physician William Salmon ...”

“... him about being the model for William Boot in Scoop, and he admitted, when I pushed him, that he may indeed have taken a few too many suitcases to Addis Ababa in 1936. ‘Evelyn overdid it,’ he said. ‘Overdoing it was rather his thing.’We sat upstairs under a huge portrait of Disraeli. Thatcher was across from me, wearing a blue, sparkly twinset and a ...”

“... look of the year, and on Boxing Day, Greta Gerwig brought out a new cinematic version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel. What I found surprising in these books, especially after an adulthood of reading novels with almost no plot in which people rarely improve, is that change is possible, for the better, and even expected. It would be ridiculous to imagine that ...”

“... is open; he looks to his left out of the corners of his eyes at his target. Other photographs may say more about the game of cricket, but no other picture better conveys the intent of the fast bowler who at the moment of delivery has eyes only for the batsman at the other end of the wicket. He’s in for the ...”

“... are in some ways predictable: there is a room at Tate Britain given over to theatre, in which one may view Noël Coward’s monogrammed scarlet dressing gown and Oliver Messel’s designs for the 1959 film of Suddenly Last Summer. Style, poise, extravagance: these we might expect. (Consider Glyn Philpot’s 1935 painting of Glen Byam Shaw, who is playing ...”

“... rebels. Morrison emerged as the compromise candidate, and became prime minister on 24 August. It may not have been an outright victory for Dutton, but it was certainly a failure for the moderate wing of the party: Morrison campaigned for a ‘No’ vote in the same-sex marriage referendum and, as immigration minister, launched a militarised campaign, known ...”

“... This ‘abstract turn’ didn’t signal an abandonment of the personal. The geographic shapes may seem little more than formalist ciphers – Bowling has at times encouraged this reading – but they are images that linger like after-traces on the retina. Africa morphs into South America; Guyana lurks in a sea of colour. In Bartica ...”

“... a British Library exhibition that runs until 22 September, pulls you up as you look around. You may feel that you have stepped into the best provincial antique shop ever: Farrington reminds you that what you are looking at is material evidence of a punishing cultural encounter, driven by a desire for the smell, taste, colour and texture of exotic stuffs and ...”

“... much younger than herself they might have been in skirted sailor suits, and that her own frocks may have been like the high-waisted dresses children wear in a fashion plate from 1895.Not that knowing how people looked doesn’t still require an act of imagination. The engravings and photographs make people stiffer than they are – at best they resemble the ...”

“... landscapes and attempts at large figure subjects, and complemented by his sister’s pictures – may, like those overlapping Bloomsbury memoirs in which alternative views allow one to guess at unshown dimensions, do something for his reputation.As a prelude to the Tate’s juxtaposition of brother and sister you can, until 15 October, see a small exhibition ...”

“... point in these diaries that the continuously intimate conversations Khrushchev had with Micunovic may have been part of a design to convince the West that relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were much better than they really were. Refuting this, Khrushchev himself insists that they are simply part of his design to put things between the two ...”

“... chief characters in the film are someone and no one, haunted either by who they were or what they may be one day: human, for example. The fauna of the film complete this impression: a dog with a swan’s head and neck, a pig with a chicken’s body. There is also an automobile with a horse’s head. These creations are the results of experiments conducted by ...”

“... and his fits of bad temper, which briefly make him look like a bad guy. The general effect may create in us a nostalgia for the edgy coherence of the first part. There is, though, a refrain that echoes through the film. Despite the importance of the architectural meaning of the title, the other meaning, the wrong meaning, is also intimately ...”

“... that a military dictatorship had been in power in the country since 1964, aided by the US, we may begin to feel a little baffled by all the rowdy joy. At this time, the government was already organising the disappearance of people it disapproved of. A further dark note is struck when a family planning to move to England for safety suggests that the Paivas ...”