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“... diapers of HSBC are hung out to catch the eye) and palimpsests (in Fleet Street you can still read ‘National Westminster’ on the granite, under the perkier ‘Natwest’). Badging is, of course, much cheaper and easier to apply than a deeper architectural identity. You can put a badge on any structure, and take it away painlessly, if expensively (the ...”

“... this may explain why, although it is a greater picture than the Woman Bathing, one does not read the pose with the same confidence or imagine it as easily with one’s own body. Bathsheba is tenderly and strongly painted but she does not display herself. Nor does she assert, as a Titian Venus does, confidence in the power of her own beauty. Instead, the ...”

“... drives you back. You must wait for your turn in the line because people linger. Some pictures are read quickly: Rothko’s are best taken slowly. Yet even if we all say the same things about the exhilaration and the pleasure we feel when reading black on purple-black or red on red on red, finding the depths in the pictures suggested by some of Rothko’s ...”

“... not imply that it is just one explanation among equals, is a bit like finding a video booth in St Peter’s where you can listen to cardinals defending the virgin birth. It may have seemed necessary because this is a joint exhibition to which the American Museum of Natural History and other US institutions have contributed. The voices are from America, where ...”

“... work was. Later he made advertising displays and did a little modelling for a hat company. He read a great deal, and made illustrations for Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned and could only be read at the National Library. He lived for a while in a ‘weekender’ (a cottage in the bush) and tried to stow away on a ...”

“... This is not an easy book to read, even though it is written clearly and at times elegantly; its authors have swathed and encumbered their interpretations in so many reservations and second thoughts that it takes some attentive detective-work to discover their meaning. One is reminded of the famous lines in which Horace celebrated the daring of the first navigator: Illi robur et aes triplex Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci Commisit pelago ratum Primus ...”

“... but every leaf is not the only thing to notice. The structure of the little bench can be read. The struts stop the seat sagging and hold in the feet, which would otherwise splay out. The pieces running along under the seat make it stronger too. The visual structure of the picture is equally simple. The light is behind, and the shadow of the tiles ...”

“... Apollinaire in the seat of honour as the ‘impresario of the avant-garde’. More recently Peter Read has explored in rich and rewarding detail the complex relationship between Apollinaire and Picasso, illustrating the way the ‘creative dialogue’ between them ‘fostered and inspired some of their finest art and poetry’. Apollinaire’s ...”

“... who do not believe salvation can be achieved through small things: ‘To a woman,’ she writes (read ‘man’ as well), ‘the consciousness of being well-dressed’ – read ‘appropriately’ or ‘pleasingly’ or ‘beautifully’ too – ‘gives a sense of tranquillity that religion fails to bestow.’ And for ...”

“... Caravaggio did with his low-life models and sprawled saints, and Goya with royal portraits which read as caricatures – flatter a modern idea of the independence and revolutionary duties of art. Although the gears of our artistic culture mesh as tightly as any ever did with sources of power and money we can point to acts of aesthetic intransigence which, we ...”

“... more than passive admiration. There is a 1940 portrait of Crisp in the exhibition. You can read in it the dedicated model’s preternatural awareness of self. A sitter with no talent for self-presentation could stymie the photographer. But McBean had something to offer beyond complicity with the sitter’s self-projection. He was a craftsman; his ...”

“... the Abyss, the blue shadows on the pink sand – these things are like simple sentences, easy to read, and very easy to like and ...”

“... translucent replica of the plinth, set on top of the plinth itself, was the easiest to read as a comment on the problem of how to make a monument in an un-monumental age. Its dimensions – it was big: no sculpture in the square matches, as hers did, the volume of its plinth – and its translucence might, if you chose, be given a meaning, but not ...”

“... are arranged in rows. In all these cases you don’t so much look at what’s in front of you as read it. The art of arrangement is the one that brings exhibition curators into conversation with those whose work they display; and, as Sze’s installations show, it is an art that shows its essence best in the laying out of everyday things. What makes her work ...”

“... at that time or at any time since. There he used his own experience as the basis for scenes which read as commentaries on the general experience of war. When it was finished in 1932 he returned to Cookham with another architectural project in mind, one which would have been an even more radical mix of the personal and the universal: a ‘Church of Me’. What ...”