“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... but you can’t be certain that this is a scene with a top and a bottom. In Painting with White Form of 1913 the black lines are more likely to have lives of their own. As you follow these changes you come to realise how eagerly the eye searches for structure – top/bottom, near/far, object/ground. Horizontal and vertical have their place too. The ...”