“... The tenth and last room of the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern (until 2 May) contains Economic Values, a piece from 1980. It consists of metal shelving stacked with household goods in bottles, packets and bags, all bought in what was then the GDR. They have, as Beuys intended, begun to disintegrate. The walls of the room are, as he requested, hung with ‘19th-century paintings in gold frames from the host museum ...”

“... The painting A Man with a Quilted Sleeve in the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery (until 18 May) makes sense as a self-portrait. The bearded young man looks over his shoulder towards you as an artist would who had turned from canvas to mirror. There are also two undoubted self-portraits here. The Berlin picture (from the mid to late 1540s) shows Titian in vigorous old age – although exactly how old he was is a mystery since his date of birth is uncertain ...”

“... could be – it is in the rather vague way music is sometimes said to be. The feelings they rouse may seem too deep for words. I cannot get rid of the feeling that they could easily be too ...”

“... and again are the serge-like smell and the rustle and flap of nuns’ habits, the beauty of the May Day processions, the smell of candles and what is always referred to as beeswax (although a Dominican once told me that they had long ago switched to Mansion polish), and beyond all this the abiding sense, at one and the same time, of security and ...”

“... vivid, large-scale photographs, currently on display at the Hepworth Wakefield (until 1 May). It’s the details that quicken the pulse. The way her hair falls; the way she cocks her hip to the side; the roll of her trouser cuff; fingers softly interlaced; the faint wrinkle of her dress; her pencil-thin eyebrows; the way the tendons in her forearm ...”

“... working life he saw the reputation and value of the modern art he admired rise. At the very end he may have sensed that an art world which took account of his kind of concentrated attention was giving way to one which was more interested in quick shocks and managed celebrity. Almost the last contact I had with him was after I’d written something to the ...”

“... wall. There is something Magrittean about the emptiness and puzzlement of the small scene. There may be a clue to its meaning in the strange perspective of the window bars, their connecting joints angled outwards to suggest a point of view closer to the window than the point from which it has been painted, as though the viewer were a single eyeball, drifting ...”

“... sculpture. Roussel declares it his duty to disclose this secret method, so that future writers may benefit from his innovations. Though the essay reveals, with a multitude of examples, how Roussel wrote certain of his books, it doesn’t attempt to explain why he developed and adopted such singular procedures. He directs our attention to the psychologist ...”

“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a ...”

“... thinks, is that showing in a famous gallery will get you plenty of attention: even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons’s work, the critical point is that people take time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons’s work with more importance than the work of ...”

“... the Bluff Cove disaster came about, while Admiral Woodward – whose hair is not red but brown – may feel hard done by in the chapters about squabbles among Task Force commanders. But The Falklands War conveys well the driving impatience, the rivalry for chances of martial glory, which possessed many politicians and officers and which, on several ...”

“... Waldeck-Rochet (until, in practice, 1970) and Georges Marchais. The meeting at Argenteuil may well have been held, not to settle questions of Party philosophy, but to bring the intellectuals into line, in what R.W. Johnson, in his new book, has picturesquely called ‘the long march of the French Left’, culminating in the Communist-Socialist ...”

“... bringing about a peculiar and unique degree of insideness in their literary relations. Tsvetaeva may have had a brief affair with Mandelstam during the 1914 war; later, and in her passionately personal fashion, she was in love with Pasternak, whose oddly equine profile she described with an affectionate shaft of wit as combining ‘both Arab and his ...”

“... over and that of Gramscism is beginning. I hope she is right. However, her own example suggests it may not be so easy to break free from the great webs of Ecole Normale library-paste and intellectual terrorism. The same is true of the Buci-Glucksmann and Sassoon volumes. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s study, especially, can be seen as a mighty struggle for its ...”

“... easily repeated. It’s possible Labour should have supported a soft Brexit as agreed by Theresa May; but that would be to ignore May’s disinclination to compromise and her vulnerability to backbench rebellion, not to mention the likelihood that such a move on Labour’s part would have blown apart the shadow cabinet and ...”