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“... history is what the land looked like six thousand years ago, before the first farmers. Was it wall-to-wall forest with a few small gaps, as Arthur Tansley supposed in The British Islands and their Vegetation seventy years ago, or was it a savannah of slowly shifting groves and wide expanses of grass kept open by large ...”

“... The main feature of Private Eye: The First Fifty Years, at the V&A until 8 January, is a large wall plastered with the magazine’s covers. A monumental celebration, on a grand scale, of a scruffy little rag whose production values, to this day, owe much to its memorable antecedent, the British Railways lavatory roll ...”

“... are surrounded by splendid, if overbearing peaks of cartographic art: an atlas as tall as a man, wall maps of similar size, photographs of palace corridors where every wall is a painted map. There are smaller, curious, handsome and instructive things as well, but nothing is here just because it is a significant piece of ...”

“... later.The work exhibited in Video Acts: Single Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust, at the ICA until 19 October, was mostly made between the late 1960s and early 1980s. It takes you back to the origins of the medium. These are video incunabula, blurred, crudely lit and shaky, like images from CCTV cameras or ...”

“... and an authoritative assessment of his achievement in all of them is a remarkably difficult task. Richard Pfaff has courageously undertaken the assignment and has produced a long and painstaking study which deals with James’s work in commendable detail. The life is never neglected, but Pfaff has correctly conceived of his biography as that of a scholar, and ...”

“... demands to be touched, and can’t be: visiting is excruciating, in the best way. Against one wall rests the Queen Anne bureau Ede bought for £8 when he was 12, much more to the taste of the kind of boy he was than the ‘first-class bicycle’ he could have got for the money instead. The Edes’ kitchen was small and spartan; it’s now a tiny staff ...”

“... of shorthand for much the film isn’t saying, perhaps can’t say. Roma was eloquently berated by Richard Brody in the New Yorker for not telling us enough about its time and place, and above all for not giving its heroine a voice, just submitting her to series of unexplained actions. Brody is right if we think Cuarón is trying to be De Sica or Rossellini ...”

“... where thirty years ago the lavatory consisted of a sink, a hole in the floor, and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called ...”

“... her ghost chained there: the woodcut from Foxes ‘Acts and Monuments’ that hung on the chapel wall beside ‘The Light of the World’, a mild-mannered Christ, his jaunty crown of thorns … The minister’s stage-effects were rage and unforgiveness, his colours red and red again which were heart’s blood and hell-fire, the least of us already ...”

“... crenellated towers, domed turrets and mullioned windows – the whole enclosed by a defensive wall – became visible. At 1 p.m. the sun cleared the mists and the Royalist garrison opened fire. Waller replied with an artillery barrage that began mid-afternoon and lasted into the night. An entreaty to the defending marquess of Winchester to surrender with ...”

“... narrative. Its counter is Fort Knox, a house so called because of its high surrounding wall, occupied by Mrs Bugler, a ripe widow whose sports are of the supine sort, and her fey daughter Alicia. Imagine, then, two castles, one of lusty enterprise, the other of enterprising lust, set against the backdrop world of the stone-strewn, sheep-habited ...”

“... by Robert Smithson on his excursions to post-industrial New Jersey in the late 1960s, or by Richard Long on his spectral trails through Britain in the following decades.In fact, the work of Long and other British walking-artists such as Hamish Fulton is an insistent presence in the exhibition, nowhere more clearly than in the show’s major sculptural ...”

“... house was likely to involve a discussion about the placing of a sculpture or just how high on the wall a tapestry should hang. He loved arguing about who was the greatest this or that – he was passionate about cricket, perhaps his penchant for making dream teams came from there. In his own case there are no lists to be made. No one else was playing quite ...”

“... of Time, a detective novel set entirely in a hospital bedroom, which is also an apologia for Richard III. Imagine my surprise when, in the tube from Heathrow, there came in and sat down opposite me a young and rather austere woman who was reading, with the appropriate detached bespectacled air, the latest of the Ricardian Society’s Bulletins. And she ...”

“... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...”