“... the illusion of killing? The fun is unmistakable, in the tale and in the movie as we watch it. It may be that De Palma’s offhand and cheerful tone tells one story and hides another. The tone is the same whatever he is talking about: his philandering father, what went wrong or right with this or that film, which actor or writer was totally unbearable, his ...”

“... by the Suns heat in those countries, so Eels are bred of a particular dew falling in the months of May or June on the banks of some particular Ponds or Rivers, apted by nature for that end; which in a few dayes are by the Suns heat, turned into Eels, and some of the Ancients have called the Eels that are thus bred, The Off-Spring of Jove.’ Before he became a ...”

“... He says he has spent the last 15 years in Algiers, running a restaurant, and he implies that he may have done a little more than that. ‘I had a certain influence,’ he says. There is something about the contented, theatrical way in which he says that these were the best years of his life that makes us wonder what he is hiding, and his brother-in-law ...”

“... film, is Woodcock, so innocent and engaging at moments, so nasty and tyrannical at others, that we may find ourselves believing the character is a single person only because there is just the one actor. Vicky Krieps is Alma, an open-faced, rather plain woman who can look beautiful in the right light, whose peculiar gift is to be susceptible to Woodcock’s ...”

“... the bravura flecks and dashes, transforming into frills and buttons, of Venetian painting. It may be also that these really were domestic servants: it was surely easier to engage them for sittings while living on the estate of his patrons, the Castaings, just north of Chartres, where at the same time he was painting a peasant woman as Rembrandt’s ...”

“... been reconfigured as a dispersed set of objects in the gallery, including props and images, which may function without the artist’s presence, and so provoke the question of where and how each of these categories – video, performance and installation – abuts or bleeds into the others. In 1976 Jonas had an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art ...”

“... had shouted at John Humphrys five times before breakfast, for several weeks in a row. (Humphrys in May 2003, told by his boss to read out Alastair Campbell’s insistence that the dodgy dossier wasn’t sexed up: ‘I can’t read this rubbish!’ That’s my Today programme.) But I barely know who to be angry at. The people who voted for Brexit have something ...”

“... is the parody Fox News banner running across the bottom of the credits: ‘Gender-fluid illegals may be entering the country twice.’ Many of the best lines are given to Tom, Shiv’s weak, sneaky, bullied-and-bullying husband. In one episode, the top executives of Waystar are on a corporate retreat in Hungary – or as Tom puts ...”

“... the bench: but each of these is a discrete task of rendering, applied to a rigid groundplan. Degas may have reciprocated the admiration of Gauguin, who in turn inspired Picasso, but in this regard those other artists (not to mention Cézanne) show greater mental energy. Every mark they make speaks to every other mark. Gauguin tends to pile up objects. He wants ...”

“... and image, and especially the vexed relay between written and photographic evidence. Loch Ness may seem a whimsical subject for an artist whose source material has recently included psychiatric reports on Nazi war criminals and interviews from the 1960s with Minimalist artists, but it’s worth considering the machinery of print and picture by which the ...”

“... Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and who was notorious for having married another patient, Elaine May, a decade earlier. Mayer was 27. In the journal – there were two, in fact; Rubinfine read one while she wrote in the other – she attempted to record her states of consciousness. The collected work, a three-year experiment published as Studying Hunger ...”

“... that Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) can be distressed at the right time in his career. Or the effect may be amazing: all kinds of things happen in our minds if we learn that Napoleon is among the crowd at the guillotining of Marie Antoinette in 1793. As a matter of fact he was in Toulon at the time, putting an end to a royalist revolt backed by England and Spain ...”

“... using transformers to develop Large Language Models in 2018. The most recent, GPT-3, released in May 2020, was trained on 45 terabytes of text data and has 175 billion parameters. The journalists and scientists who were given access to it were amazed at the fluency of the text it generated in response to simple requests or queries. The most exciting ...”

“... says his little world is a place of order and love, and if it doesn’t reflect the big world it may at least offer us ‘the chance of forgetting [it] for a while’. A restaurant owner, so in love with his own joviality that he doesn’t understand what a bully he is, sees his little world as a zone of ‘security, wisdom and order’, where ‘the shadows ...”

“... life, at once real and imagined.In the large-scale Untitled (2021), a platypus with orange braids may be an animal or a woman or both – one dreaming of the other. In Drawing like the Elephant (2023), four children display their drawings to the viewer (or whoever is imagined in our place). Two of the children have sprouted walrus tusks; one has bright red ...”