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“... Barbican until 14 April and in the well-made book which accompanies the exhibition. They can be read as a recapitulation of the history of the unsolicited photograph: a history which begins with the first ethnographic records and ends with confessional snapshots. It is a progress which has been advanced by technology and marked by transgression. Val ...”

“... round the figure of Christ and the group beside him has the plate been wiped to allow lines to be read. It is an experiment in how little you need to see to know what is going on, and asks if seeing less might not be to experience more.Goya’s ‘private albums’ – there were eight of them – were not sketchbooks: they did not contain notes or studies ...”

“... waiting for the warning hooter as they might once have listened for the midday gun. If you have read in the papers about what Gormley has done, you cross the bridge to the Baltic for the first time in a curious and expectant mood – as though you were hoping to see a flypast or a marathon go by. You are as much engaged by the tasks Gormley has set himself ...”

“... Nouveau’ pavilion was allowed to exemplify the move from decoration to pure form, and was read as an early sign of the triumph of rational design which would follow. Art Deco reproduces two of Osbert Lancaster’s illustrations of 1939 from Homes Sweet Homes, ‘Functionalist interior’ and ‘Modernistic interior’, and says of them that ‘in this ...”

“... the creation of a lifestyle for a cultivated élite. Similarly, A Room of One’s Own can be read either as a militant feminist manifesto or as a plea for a privileged rentier culture, a weakness discussed forthrightly by Woolf herself in her essay, ‘Am I a Snob?’ In the discussion session which followed Williams’s paper, Bernard Sharratt remarked ...”

“... to determine which is the better book. Richard Burton was printed by Butler and Tanner Limited, Peter Sellers by the Fakenham Press, and since the one establishment is in Somerset and the other in Norfolk, it is fair to absolve both of them from the sort of catchpenny opportunist hustling which these days has the publishing world of London by the ...”

“... did not fit into traditional pigeon-holes must be up to no good. The same idea seems to underlie Peter Abelard’s bold attempt, discussed by Le Goff in another essay, to assimilate university teachers to knights, describing arguments as weapons and disputations as battles or tournaments. He was trying to legitimate his own profession and incidentally to ...”

“... names written in sand, on the wind, in water; the reading which destroys what is being read – are well-worn poetic images, the literal illegibility and real fragility of Leone and Macdonald’s pieces seem to have had a remarkable effect. Works of art like these offer experiences which bypass pure frustration at intellectual and emotional ...”

“... What exactly do we know about Peter Sellers? There have been at least half a dozen biographies before this one, and through them the outline of his career has become pretty familiar. We know that he was born in 1925, the only son of a Jewish mother, that his parents worked in a touring theatre company, and that during the war he joined the RAF and performed in Ralph Reader’s Gang Shows ...”

“... of the perpetual student is also a manual for those who want to know about books without having to read them. Dip into it, and you find a variety of passing pleasures: the early history of ‘proletarian’; how oysters fatten at the full moon, how a dolphin fell in love with a handsome boy; Pompey agonises about his grammar, Virgil like a she-bear licks his ...”

“... fiddly enterprise, but carried out with such tact and gusto that the whole thing is a pleasure to read. The snippets present formidable technical problems. The papyri reveal their dustbin origins, torn, stained and nibbled by worms. Their text has no capital letters and no word-divisions: its desultory punctuation provides no question marks and no inverted ...”

“... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...”

“... teachers of their film classes’. She complains that ‘the Fields they idolised was the man they read about and superimposed on the Fields they saw (or didn’t see) on the screen.’ Yet her own narrative the autobiographical bits in these essays has many scenes which reinforce notions of Hollywood gleaned from the screen. She deplores a history of film in ...”

“... or nearby sea. Paint defeats photography here because, I guess, it encourages you to get close and read the surface of the picture and the marks on it; the photograph leads you to no second level. Constable’s oil sketches made on one side of the Channel and Bonington’s made on the other reveal how little you see when you sit looking out from a beach but ...”

“... look as up-to-date as the architecture, while new designs for serious modern seating can often be read as variations on something Eames or Le Corbusier or Aalto did more than 50 years ago. There are expensive versions, cheap rip-offs and honest variations – check out the Ikea catalogue. And the hi-tech story is not over: the Aeron – a confection which has ...”