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“... way you have to concentrate to keep your sense of direction. I suppose it’s much the same with white-outs in the Arctic or the mountains, but I’ve never been in one of those. Once you enter the bright clamminess of Blind Light the experience you have is about as structureless as any a three-dimensional work can offer – more so, for example, than what ...”

“... of the mountain. In The Blue Rigi Venus, the morning star, is reflected in the lake and burns white in a cobalt sky which will gradually reach down to replace the dawn-yellow band on the horizon. In achieving these effects, Turner has not borrowed the broad brushstrokes of the wash sketches. Rather, he builds up much of the surface of the pictures with ...”

“... through the door from another party – the men’s coats unbuttoned, the women’s bosoms as white as their eyes are bright. The Hogarths, a decent, prosperous lot, are here for the food and drink. The Hilliards – some in allusive fancy dress – are full of poetry. The Freuds, who haven’t dressed up at all, slump in armchairs. Some of them fall ...”

“... the Impressionists and not with the Russians. Kandinsky’s abstracts and Malevich’s black-on-white circle – it hangs like a full stop in the last room and seems to announce not just the end of the exhibition but the end of old painting – are as well known from histories of modern art as Matisse’s Dance and as much written about, if not, perhaps, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are passages of wiry drawing in some plates – for example, the figure of Pitt as Death and the white horse which carries him in Presages of the Millennium – which only the most vigorous and controlled pen drawing could match, and which only a master in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland.’ These colourful pleasures are shown in black and white, for this is an exhibition dominated by engravings. Reynolds’s portrait of Garrick being tugged right and left by Comedy and Tragedy is here, but as a mezzotint. Hogarth’s work is represented in the form of drawings and prints, not paintings. The ...”

“... the foreground of the story, a charismatic stranger has walked into town, clad in loose white garments and carrying a rifle. He has curls, a beard, intense and disturbing milky-blue eyes and a golden body. He talks like a religious huckster but the locals are mesmerised by the splendid opals he shows them. Soon they’re in business ...”

“... the Annales School; and finally of US-centred literary theory. ‘Tropologists’ such as Hayden White and, latterly, Frank Ankersmit made their own attempt to fill the vacuum by suggesting that, since there was apparently no other structural principle to hand, the kernel of historical writing must be found in its exemplification of deep, ahistorical ...”

“... always like that for him,’ the child mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout ...”

“... included leading figures from the Independent Group, such as Eduardo Paolozzi and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who displayed a series of found objects in a post-apocalyptic mirrored shed. Richard Hamilton’s group presented a funfair vision that launched the British Pop Art movement. Robby the Robot, star of the science-fiction movie Forbidden ...”

“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties. Lennon’s jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole ...”

“... Backward-ranging comparisons, and a risk of anachronism, are likely to enter into an experience of Peter Taylor’s fine stories, for his is an art which makes much of the existence of traditions, and of a deep past. At all events, it seems clear that the stories exhibit Austen’s dedication to a class, and that the class he is concerned with carries points ...”

“... Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckledand foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckonme to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes ...”