“... described in broken washes and fine hatched lines and rows of dots which leave the texture of the white paper showing through. The lines describing curves are precise – each the result of a whole-arm movement, not a finger-driven squiggle. The width of the lines varies as pressure on the brush increases and decreases. Ravilious was an engraver; it is no ...”

“... cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African cricket was. Take the schoolboy generation I saw rising around me. Playing against Hilton College, I came up against Hylton Ackerman and Mike Procter – the latter opening both the batting and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High ...”

“... The​ American photographer Peter Hujar once told a friend who was feeling unattractive: ‘As you’re walking along, say to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... it to them. Cats’ Eyes is a book of, to my eye, rather repellently neat and stylised black and white illustrations. But it is much more interesting and amusing than many prettier productions. More a piece of feline sociology than a story, it describes the life of Tiger from birth to death, showing the world from cat level and through ...”

“... starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had black walls (semi-gloss), white ceilings and woodwork, green painted floors and yellow curtains. Much of what is reported of Lutyens suggests that, often in admirable ways, he never grew up. The jokes, puns and flippancy, which he used to cover his sense of social inadequacy, the funny ...”

“... in irregular employment and part-time art education. He could not draw well enough for Mr Leyshon-White’s commercial art agency, so he ran the correspondence course. He enjoyed writing to rural amateurs telling them how bad their work was. Later he made advertising displays and did a little modelling for a hat company. He read a great deal, and made ...”

“... drink and sex and sleep; at midnight some of them dress up in black, with blackened faces, some in white, with whitened faces, and sally forth. Some scholars have read this scene as serious ritual; others as a typological orgie de brigands with satanic trimmings. The cynics are surely right. In the black and ...”

“... as a novelist that he will continue to be known most widely. His third and most recent novel, The White Hotel, has been especially successful in America, with the film rights lately sold for half a million dollars.* In his literary sympathies as well as his choice of subjects Thomas has tended to be something of an outsider in this country, and in his free ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in ...”

“... as well and once in a while (they seem to be mostly herded into barns) you see Chianina cattle, as white as the bull in Claude Lorrain’s Rape of Europa. Mourjou is mainly cow pasture and fodder crops. The livestock there, too, is handsome: dark red-brown Salers cows, each herd with its pale Charolais bull and buff calves. In both Mourjou and Santa Cristina ...”

“... coloured), mainly in ink, most shapes quite (but not too) tidily filled in with white gouache, pale watercolour, acrylic, crayon, resin or varnish. Among the groups set out in the list of plates in the catalogue (from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles where the show originated) are ‘tables and chairs’, ‘floors’, ‘beds and ...”

“... Stanford mansion: dark rooms, much carved and polished wood and stone, heavy drapes setting off white marble statuary. Eadweard Muybridge, ‘Emptying Bucket of Water, Plate 404’ (1887) San Francisco, made rich by the goldrush of the 1850s, was on the verge of being made even richer by the new transcontinental railway. It was a good place for a ...”

“... curving black lines, stand out from pale backgrounds. Highly coloured objects are set against white or coloured backgrounds in other pictures too, often partitioned by black thread-like lines or overlapping circles and polygons. A preference for figures-on-ground to overall compositions, black lines, thin at first, later stronger, primary colours applied ...”