“... of atom bombs, magazine ads and cheesy bondage photos. Goodman’s poster for the Doom Show, which may have been the best thing in it, is at the Grey Art Gallery, spray-painted on a crumpled, fire-damaged edition of a daily newspaper. Lurie, a Latvian Jew and concentration camp survivor, made what he described as ‘no! art’. It has scarcely lost its power ...”

“... It grows up to six centimetres long, has a brown or white shell and a speckled body that may range in colour from grey to orange. In sheltered bays, these molluscs settle into fine, soft mud or muddy sand, where they mate in undulant chains, half a dozen at once. When disturbed from their orgies, the snails swim away using two broad fins or ...”

“... to Granada, where he hoped to resettle permanently; and to Portici in southern Italy, where he may have caught the malaria that would later kill him. In hotter climates he experimented with paintings in bolder blues and earth tones. The best of these, Beach at Portici, remains at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, but Street in Granatello and Seascape at ...”

“... Desnoes to change the title of his novel after the movie came out, and we can begin by asking what may happen when a technical term from international economics is used as an instrument of cultural or psychological diagnosis. A few instances, to set the scene. For Sergio, Cuba is ‘this underdeveloped island’. It is ‘one of the signs of ...”

“... one of the more ‘real’ characters in the film, and K says she is ‘real enough’ for him, we may wonder where this is going. Perhaps electric sheep, weary of mechanical physicality and borrowed memories, dream of phantasmagoric androids, and humans don’t make it at all into the final ...”

“... and house sparrows at that!’ But it is from Carrigskeewaun that he tends to begin. His volumes may then dip back to the experiences of the Great War, in which Longley’s father fought (in a kilt, we are told). Those evocations of war – some worthy of Isaac Rosenberg, some eerily funny – often mingle with the third imaginative centre of Longley’s ...”

“... all seething in the plasma, like underwater creatures, like the weird subterranean species that may be shapes in the water for the aghast Thai boys as they are drawn through caves measureless to man, inhaling and imagining they are breathing and staying alive. We were dead ...”

“... with the US government has been critical in the case against Chapo. ‘A kilogram of cocaine may have a wholesale value of $18,000 in Guadalajara, Mexico,’ Margarito Flores said in a grand jury statement, ‘but that same kilogram would have a wholesale market value of $30,000 in Chicago.’ Between 2006 and 2008, the brothers were selling roughly $60 ...”

“... that animated Flandrin’s patrons in an age of revolution and progress, one never knows when they may rise again. Flandrin’s commission was part of a thirty-year project to repair the church after the Revolution, and was championed by Victor Hugo among others. The recent restoration is a major event which has attracted little notice. Attention is instead ...”

“... overpriced and underwhelming software until there’s no space left on your computer or phone, it may look less like a positive feedback loop and more like a vicious circle.Another thing about software is that ‘there’s no regulatory agency,’ and an ‘imperfect’ product will get ‘feedback’ from ‘enthusiastic’ customers (that’s one way of ...”

“... you want to see or interact with – perhaps a second or two later. So, for example, your phone may be kept for longer in the high-energy state in which there is a dedicated radio channel open between it and a mobile phone mast.Digital advertising firms also embed tracking code in websites and in the software packages they provide to developers of mobile ...”

“... The mall is divided into two distinct levels, a result of the building’s complicated history. It may look like a single symmetrical mass of brick, but it’s really two buildings, one from the 1920s and the other from the 1950s, concrete-framed and clad. For the first time, members of the public can now see inside, and the difference between the two ...”

“... too much me. And, frankly, a bit loathsome.But let’s keep it light at the end. Quoting Barthes may lift the tone.Describing the gaucherie of Twombly’s hand Barthes remarks on its lightness, its inclination gradually to erase itself and fade away in a vapour of innocence. He admires the impulse ‘to link in a single state what appears and what ...”

“... of God’ early last century. The landscape painters in American Sublime (at Tate Britain until 19 May) believed, as most people did, that the Earth was God’s creation and that its bones, its visible crust, were ‘a Book of Revelations in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the ...”

“... In the more complete retrospectives, you may find a corner given over to drawings the artist did as a child. Typically, they will show ships, soldiers and, especially, horses. Pictures by someone who even at seven or eight was able to get things looking right bring back memories of the children in your class who were ‘good at art ...”