“... It’s impossible​ to discuss new developments in money without thinking for a moment about what money is. The best place to start thinking about that is with money itself. Consider the UK’s most common paper money, the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty ...”

“... The​ West Bund quarter of Shanghai runs along a bend of the Huangpu river, about eight kilometres south of the city’s downtown. There were once docks here, with a large facility for mixing concrete. Planes landed at Lunghua airfield. As industry moved out from the city, the riverside became available to developers. West Bund is now Shanghai’s art quarter, and an annual art fair is housed in one of the old airport hangars ...”

“... The​ German painter Jörg Immendorff died in 2007, at the age of 61, after a long period suffering from motor neurone disease. His reputation had been tarnished by a scandal a few years earlier involving cocaine and prostitutes, but by this stage his artistic career had in any case already begun to falter; his late works never quite captured the success of his Café Deutschland series made around the turn of the 1980s, or the intense political works made after studying with Joseph Beuys at the Academy in Düsseldorf in the 1960s ...”

“... Tronies​ were character studies, popular among 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters: useful images, painted from life and often recycled in larger works. They weren’t portrait commissions, and as tools for artists they were less bound by convention and the need for flattery. The tronie face might be laughing, crying, whistling, shouting, grinning, gurning ...”

“... The most sordid, even depraved literature of our time, soft-core pornography possibly apart, is the political memoir or biography. In the United States these are now rushed to the press within a few weeks of the individual’s having left or been ejected from office, this in the hope of beating the benign and ineluctable forces that are returning the individual to the obscurity for which nature intended him ...”

“... The Abolitionists in the Park​ (2020-21), a large oil painting by the American artist Nicole Eisenman, shows a group of figures sitting in City Hall Park in New York. They are part of the 2020 protest to defund the New York Police Department in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Eisenman herself appears twice in the scene – as a sleeping form on the left of the picture and on the right with her son and daughter ...”

“... It’s a moment of confusion and loathing that most of us have experienced. You’re in a shop. It’s time to pay. You reach for your purse or wallet and take out your last note. Something about it doesn’t feel quite right. It’s the wrong shape or the wrong colour and the design is odd too and the note just doesn’t seem right and … By now you’ve realised: oh shit! It’s the dreaded Scottish banknote! Tentatively, shyly – or briskly, brazenly, according to character – you proffer the note ...”

“... In his biography​ of the painter Chaïm Soutine, Monroe Wheeler tells the story of Soutine’s obsession with Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing of 1654, which shows his wife, Hendrickje Stoffels, standing in a pool of water, gingerly hitching up her skirt. Rather than copy the original, Soutine took the unorthodox approach of restaging the scene and painting his own version first-hand ...”

“... A View of the Sky from a Prison Window, painted in 1823 by the German artist Carl Gustav Carus, now hangs in the National Gallery. It is one of a handful of recent acquisitions, which include an intricately painted Banquet Still Life by the 17th-century Dutch painter Floris van Dijck, and the spectacularly eccentric (and currently anonymous) 16th-century Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret, with its grotesque dragon at the bottom of the frame ...”

“... There is​ something perverse about the imagery of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946). His neatly made ink drawings and watercolours of objects, rooms and seascapes, until recently on display at the Royal Academy (the exhibition can be viewed online) convey a psychological feeling for the inert, but little or no emotional connection to the things they depict ...”

“... Pandas are peculiar bears, which spend most of their days munching bamboo. To do this, they strip off the bamboo leaves by passing the stalks between their flexible thumb and the remaining fingers. But how can a panda have an opposable thumb, when in bears the thumb lies parallel to the fingers, and inseparable from them? In fact, the panda does not have a proper thumb at all: it has five parallel digits just like other bears ...”

“... When​ Count Harry Kessler met Edvard Munch in Berlin early in 1895, Munch was ‘still young’, Kessler wrote, but seemed ‘worn out, tired, and in both a psychic and physical sense, hungry’. Munch was 31 and already known for his strange and shocking paintings, but he had yet to make any money from them. Kessler came up with a fund-raising scheme: a portfolio of prints by Munch, to be published by Julius Meier-Graefe and sold through his journal, Pan ...”

“... Visitors​ arrive in throngs at the National Palace Museum in Taipei from mainland China, queuing up to see the extraordinary collection of Chinese art: bronze, jade and ceramics, as well as painting and calligraphy, the best anywhere in the world. Taipei is the home of the old imperial collection, evacuated in 1933 from the Forbidden City before the fall of Beijing to the Japanese ...”

“... Karl Popper is perhaps the only living philosopher of science who has had a substantial influence on the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might be made for Thomas Kuhn. However, Kuhn seems to me a perceptive sociologist of science, but a poor philosopher. Also, in so far as he has had an effect on the way scientists behave, it has been pernicious: to be a great scientist, according to Kuhn, you must do revolutionary science, and the best evidence that you are doing it is that you are so obscure and inconsistent in your statements as to be wholly incomprehensible to others ...”