“... the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror.’ Rather confusingly, this story may not be apocryphal after all. The indefatigable Brunvand reveals that – uniquely – the tale has a genuine source: a report, in 1935, of one rather small reptile beneath the city streets, personally inspected by the New York City Sewer Commissioner. For the ...”

“... You can become concupiscent, like someone in a singles bar who knows that however unlikely success may seem, at least the desired object is not married and off the market. Unattached art must be judged without the crib of a museum label. It challenges you to make your own mind up. It allows you to think about possession.The icon which best gives visual form to ...”

“... and animals are spread as tapestry-like decorations over a background which fails to recede.One may doubt whether E.H. Gombrich, who died on 3 November, ever passionately liked, or was even very curious about, individual paintings, except in so far as they could illustrate the deeper matters on which he was so illuminating, in particular what goes on when ...”

“... such as microcentimetrically tolerant Rolls-Royce airplane engines, and this afternoon’s task may be the most exacting of all. He is gluing up the upper panel: six slim hexahedrons to be forced together, perfectly squared, without the least winding or washboarding – flat as a sheet of plate glass. John Hersey, The Walnut Door three four knock at the ...”

“... ones a relief. In Wilkie’s case the sheer effort and time which went into one detailed painting may have told, but a look at his early work invites other thoughts. First, just as the late pictures show him reaching for the effects other men achieved, so it is necessary to look further afield than Holland for apt comparisons with the early ones. Wilkie, who ...”

“... dead man’s hand would make you invisible, a red-headed woman crossing your path on the first of May would bring bad luck. The deposition’s dark secret is the story of the villager who had sex with sheep. The revelation upset the people of wartime County Kerry – and some present-day reviewers – and the villagers were ‘scattered like the wind ...”

“... nor useful. Kiefer’s work sticks to your imagination the way tar sticks to a shoe. You may not want it there, but you can’t scrape it off. You hear its zippy crackle follow as you try to walk away. It can make you seem to recall dreams you know you never had: dreams where you cross a clay field at the end of a grey day, your legs hardly able to ...”

“... and furniture, Alvar Aalto through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban, at the Barbican Art Gallery until 13 May. Although he designed nothing in Britain, much in the exhibition feels familiar. Materials (brick, tile, wood) and informal layouts bring to mind postwar English housing and town planning. In other English buildings the influence is direct. Colin St John ...”

“... and drawings (many from the V&A) can be seen at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 29 May. Space, even after the geometrical basis of perspective is mastered, comes in flavours which mirror changes of tone and feeling. When the arena established by the recession of marble paving, and arcades and walls at right angles to the picture plane becomes ...”

“... a classical, symbolic or biblical title. But the labels are not always firmly attached and you may be hard pressed to know just what a work represents: one group of two figures becomes The Earth and the Moon, another The Clouds, yet another The Death of Athens. A mother and child is Love that Passes. Working on The Gates of Hell, Rodin invented an ...”

“... settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters ...”

“... scale, no matter how unlikely the assemblage of monuments, ruins and speculative reconstructions may be, they have, in his drawings, a cogency unavailable to less grounded fantasies. His heirs in this work are the designers of science fiction films. His illustration to Milton, Pandemonium, or Part of the High Capital of Satan and His Peers of 1805, gives ...”

“... an elegant world not so far from the one Boucher was recording in France. But this advertising art may be misleading. Devis’s group portraits were of a stiff, starchy sort, and in Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode the charm of a pretty interior can become a moral negative. There are no regular patterns of avenue, palace and barracks – the architecture of ...”

“... sake of talking while the occupation deepens and despair gains ground. The failure of Annapolis may well trigger the Third ...”

“... also imagines that if Ivan was still there he would stand with her against the invaders.In what may be the film’s funniest scene, Ivan, finally found, is dragged to a New York courtroom where a judge is to annul the marriage. Ivan doesn’t understand anything because he is too drunk, Toros won’t stop talking, and the judge kicks them all out. In any ...”