“... that when Venetia, Lady Digby came to van Dyck’s studio to pose as Prudence she brought her own white shift and pearls; her voluminous cloaks, on the other hand, surely came from the studio prop box (if not from imagination). But in van Dyck’s portraits, as in Rubens’s allegories and religious paintings, heavy drapery forms a matrix which twists and ...”

“... days of colour television you could buy a device which, it was said, would convert your black and white set. It consisted of a transparent plastic sheet, half blue and half green. You stuck it over the screen, in the hope that once in a while the sky and the prairie would divide the picture in the right proportions. Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Landscape: The Steppe ...”

“... would probably rather have made his mark as a writer than as an editor. His first wife was Antonia White, and he desbribes how they would ‘sit for as many hours as we could allow or keep awake at our two desks. What I was writing was a novel – unpublished and happily never to be published – about a young man who gets involved in advertising when he wants ...”

“... veterans at a memorial parade. (Some objects are luckier in their materials: Hermann Gretsch’s white porcelain tableware, for example, or the Tatra T87 saloon car are showroom-fresh.) Modernism was an expression of faith in the human race’s ability to improve both itself and its surroundings. If you brought back a team of early Modernists and wanted to ...”

“... them naked or exposing themselves; but also, and quite differently, shocking because in the big white Saatchi space they must be seen as art, and as art they can do very little about the bad things they show.3 Mikhailov says that it came to him that his coloured photographs were ‘like a rash on the ill body’ – the body of the new Russian state. His ...”

“... the assemblages of welded rods are three-dimensional sketches of individuals in zigzags of bright white metal. When real people wander among these presences, whose individuality has been suppressed by their reduction to spillikins (all the attributes of surface – smoothness as well as wrinkles; freckles and creases as well as colour and blushes – are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or black nose or cheek, will often be the brightest part of the face – brighter than the ‘white’ of the eye, which is, in fact, usually grey and shadowed by the eye socket – is one step on the path leading from naive to ‘realistic’ representations of faces. Shadows and shading in pictures represent the variations in the light reflected from ...”

“... over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd. It has five catalogue essays, several pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an ...”

“... at those diversity sessions: prized less for what she said than for her presence, which made the white faculty feel better. The colleges were zones of ‘conditional hospitality’, a phrase of Derrida’s that Kapil came across in Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included. ‘People of colour in white organisations are treated as ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... grief. Not that there’s anything to be done about any of it. Doris died, at home, not long after Peter. She caught an infection, and was left unmedicated as she had wished. We got her a hospital bed and the local palliative care team looked after her. She became increasingly comatose until she stopped breathing one morning and was pronounced dead on 17 ...”

“... objects, like the turquoise mask on the poster, are finely crafted, but the snarl of large white teeth threatens. In its own time much of what is here was frightening because it was supposed to be. The message is that the future is uncertain, that bad times are probably coming, that nature is malicious and must be propitiated. A tribute list from ...”

“... nightmare, a fully knick-knacked and draped 19th-century-drawing room, modernism arrived. White and nook-free architecture left no hiding place for dirt. The architects of the Finsbury Health Centre of 1938 (Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton) made much of the clean lines of their building (going so far as to point to the gaps in traditional tiled roofs as ...”

“... transformation of girls’ clothes into women’s came at the very end of the 18th century, when white muslin, high-waisted shifts with short, puffed sleeves suggested a revolutionary freedom and a girlish innocence. Much later, the shift dresses with very short skirts of Yves Saint Laurent and Courrèges brought to 1960s parties styles which are remarkably ...”