“... more than passive admiration. There is a 1940 portrait of Crisp in the exhibition. You can read in it the dedicated model’s preternatural awareness of self. A sitter with no talent for self-presentation could stymie the photographer. But McBean had something to offer beyond complicity with the sitter’s self-projection. He was a craftsman; his ...”

“... waiting for the warning hooter as they might once have listened for the midday gun. If you have read in the papers about what Gormley has done, you cross the bridge to the Baltic for the first time in a curious and expectant mood – as though you were hoping to see a flypast or a marathon go by. You are as much engaged by the tasks Gormley has set himself ...”

“... are arranged in rows. In all these cases you don’t so much look at what’s in front of you as read it. The art of arrangement is the one that brings exhibition curators into conversation with those whose work they display; and, as Sze’s installations show, it is an art that shows its essence best in the laying out of everyday things. What makes her work ...”

“... the creation of a lifestyle for a cultivated élite. Similarly, A Room of One’s Own can be read either as a militant feminist manifesto or as a plea for a privileged rentier culture, a weakness discussed forthrightly by Woolf herself in her essay, ‘Am I a Snob?’ In the discussion session which followed Williams’s paper, Bernard Sharratt remarked ...”

“... Apollinaire in the seat of honour as the ‘impresario of the avant-garde’. More recently Peter Read has explored in rich and rewarding detail the complex relationship between Apollinaire and Picasso, illustrating the way the ‘creative dialogue’ between them ‘fostered and inspired some of their finest art and poetry’. Apollinaire’s ...”

“... did not fit into traditional pigeon-holes must be up to no good. The same idea seems to underlie Peter Abelard’s bold attempt, discussed by Le Goff in another essay, to assimilate university teachers to knights, describing arguments as weapons and disputations as battles or tournaments. He was trying to legitimate his own profession and incidentally to ...”

“... of the perpetual student is also a manual for those who want to know about books without having to read them. Dip into it, and you find a variety of passing pleasures: the early history of ‘proletarian’; how oysters fatten at the full moon, how a dolphin fell in love with a handsome boy; Pompey agonises about his grammar, Virgil like a she-bear licks his ...”

“... fiddly enterprise, but carried out with such tact and gusto that the whole thing is a pleasure to read. The snippets present formidable technical problems. The papyri reveal their dustbin origins, torn, stained and nibbled by worms. Their text has no capital letters and no word-divisions: its desultory punctuation provides no question marks and no inverted ...”

“... names written in sand, on the wind, in water; the reading which destroys what is being read – are well-worn poetic images, the literal illegibility and real fragility of Leone and Macdonald’s pieces seem to have had a remarkable effect. Works of art like these offer experiences which bypass pure frustration at intellectual and emotional ...”

“... to determine which is the better book. Richard Burton was printed by Butler and Tanner Limited, Peter Sellers by the Fakenham Press, and since the one establishment is in Somerset and the other in Norfolk, it is fair to absolve both of them from the sort of catchpenny opportunist hustling which these days has the publishing world of London by the ...”

“... various hands, in particular Lord Burlington’s. Nearly all are plans and elevations, so to read them you must extract three-dimensional reality from two-dimensional projections. You can test your interpretive abilities by turning to the handsome modern models, in unpainted beech and limewood, which first came to London in 1975, when they were included ...”

“... about how pictures should be made are often driven by a sense that they are constructed, and even read, layer by layer, stage by stage. It was an analysis that raised questions like ‘Is correct drawing or true colour of the essence?’ When Post-Impressionist painters abandoned the underlying tonal structure, they flattened the implied (sometimes ...”

“... and must be propitiated. A tribute list from the Codex Mendoza The catalogue is not easy to read: a picture of the early history and late collapse of Mexica society must be extracted from overlapping contributions that draw on different disciplines, and one’s inexperienced tongue stutters over the names of the Mexica Gods: Coyolxauhqui, the moon ...”

“... or nearby sea. Paint defeats photography here because, I guess, it encourages you to get close and read the surface of the picture and the marks on it; the photograph leads you to no second level. Constable’s oil sketches made on one side of the Channel and Bonington’s made on the other reveal how little you see when you sit looking out from a beach but ...”

“... look as up-to-date as the architecture, while new designs for serious modern seating can often be read as variations on something Eames or Le Corbusier or Aalto did more than 50 years ago. There are expensive versions, cheap rip-offs and honest variations – check out the Ikea catalogue. And the hi-tech story is not over: the Aeron – a confection which has ...”