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“... to his inspired Sowerberry in the columns of the Evening Standard. Last month on his birthday Peter’s wake was celebrated by hundreds in what is still the most successful London restaurant of our times. In the Sixties, before the age of artolatry and when gala programmes were few, I had never met until Peter a man for ...”

“... calligraphies one sees that the same scattering of straight, very fine lines (a couple in white on the bodice of the black dress, a stray wisp of hair, the eyelashes on the right eye, twigs in the plant behind her) are again used to focus the image. You find similar devices in some of Sargent’s Paris pictures. Because Impression persuades you to ...”

“... the Maidenhead bridge. Rain skeins across the picture from the right, sunlight breaks through, white steam and smoke from the engine’s stack are blown to the left. When it was exhibited in 1844, the Times critic said that railways had given ‘a new field’ for Turner’s ‘eccentric style’, ‘the dark atmosphere, bright sparkling fire of the engine ...”

“... Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture in the exhibition of another old man – the Earl of Arundel – probably painted in 1620, during Van Dyck’s first ...”

“... parasites of our own who, like us, invade all its public spaces. African street traders lay out white sheets and set out handbags with fake Dior and Prada labels on them; the police and the people object. I saw one group of traders run off like a startled herd, humping their bags of bags, while three police, like a pack of hunting dogs, scragged the least ...”

“... up to block the bottom half of the casement. Through the top half you see only sky, a puff of white cloud and the endless blue. The window and its recess apart, only a bit of the easel, arranged to take the light, says anything about the room. It isn’t a particularly good picture, but like Larkin’s poem it leads you to think about things that aren’t ...”

“... cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African cricket was. Take the schoolboy generation I saw rising around me. Playing against Hilton College, I came up against Hylton Ackerman and Mike Procter – the latter opening both the batting and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High ...”

“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... The​ American photographer Peter Hujar once told a friend who was feeling unattractive: ‘As you’re walking along, say to yourself: I’m me.’ Hujar’s subjects seem to have heeded the same advice: they exhibit a self-possession tending to the monumental. You can see it in his 1981 portrait of the actor Madeline Kahn ...”

“... volcanic lava flows. Veils of pumice rain down thunderously in orange and pink on red. Very rigid white lightning pierces voluminous clouds. Complex architecture – fancies like Gandy’s more extravagant perspectives – tumbles down on you or billets the hordes of Milton’s Satan. Take the measure of what he did from the catalogue and you are left with ...”

“... red-headed nude with scarlet nails reaches for a drink tendered by a black hand emerging from a white cuff that enters the picture at the top left-hand corner. Her feet and toes stretch out like roots to meet Art Nouveau at its most vegetative. Kitaj often used the same diagonal emphasis and similar colours and distortions. It is not a question of ...”

“... brown and lower, paler ones of grey or brown. In both the painted area is surrounded by a narrow white border. Differences between pictures that are structurally very similar and black, near-black or muddy greys and browns, allowed Rothko, and have allowed others since, to offer commentaries which, like jazz versions of simple songs, are interpretations that ...”

“... windows; there are upper galleries and chapel-like alcoves; and it is dominated by a statue in white marble of the local deity – Charles Darwin – who looks down at a huge dinosaur skeleton from the landing of the staircase that rises in a double flight at the north end. Darwin’s ideas are so central to biology that there is no wall of fossils, case ...”

“... with hardwood drawers and display cases of Waterhouse’s main museum building. You pass under the white bulge of the cocoon, and find yourself standing beside the towering glass wall that encloses it. The dramatic transition from one style of building to another seems to carry a message about one kind of biological science replacing another. A feature is made ...”

“... Cotman, after all, is now the best loved and most praised English watercolour painter. The White House at Chelsea (1800), with its distant view of a strip of riverbank, a windmill, a couple of church towers, boats and a pale evening sky, is an evocation of landscape that suggests a scientific precision of observation. Yet it was only by ...”