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“... about how pictures should be made are often driven by a sense that they are constructed, and even read, layer by layer, stage by stage. It was an analysis that raised questions like ‘Is correct drawing or true colour of the essence?’ When Post-Impressionist painters abandoned the underlying tonal structure, they flattened the implied (sometimes ...”

“... comparisons: Ivon Hitchens painted landscapes in which flowing patterns of colour can still be read as trees and water; de Kooning in America made pictures in which the bones of an unseen landscape seem to direct the reading of a field of abstract marks. But such mapping of similarity and influence shows little more than that Eardley’s way of drawing and ...”

“... and the built-in cupboards. He worked out how light would fall on the pages of a book being read in bed. The sunloungers which line the terrace overlooking the forest in an early photograph are no longer filled with consumptives – Paimio is now a general hospital – but one still reads its history in its configuration. I wish someone would film The ...”

“... various hands, in particular Lord Burlington’s. Nearly all are plans and elevations, so to read them you must extract three-dimensional reality from two-dimensional projections. You can test your interpretive abilities by turning to the handsome modern models, in unpainted beech and limewood, which first came to London in 1975, when they were included ...”

“... and must be propitiated. A tribute list from the Codex Mendoza The catalogue is not easy to read: a picture of the early history and late collapse of Mexica society must be extracted from overlapping contributions that draw on different disciplines, and one’s inexperienced tongue stutters over the names of the Mexica Gods: Coyolxauhqui, the moon ...”

“... in this Mughal miniature between Warren Hastings and his servant c.1782 – it is hard not to read a hint of a joke in the oddly large proportion of Hastings’s head to his body – reminds me of what a guide, at the end of a cultural tour of China, said to a friend who pressed her about what she really thought of the Westerners she had been ...”

“... took part in the search for and design of the clothes – tight bodices and long skirts – which read in the drawings neither as fancy dress nor quite as of their own time (the John household must, to the eye at least, have been more Pre-Raphaelite than modern). In Gwen’s portraits of Dorelia, the active poses her brother chose, in which hands are raised ...”

“... Pound and Yeats. The Kelmscott Chaucer and Modernist poetry, the argument goes, are both hard to read because they are intentionally opaque. The second claim is that the links are not coincidental, and that the achievement of the latter was, in important ways, made possible by the former. Heraldic words, words as patterns, have a long history. Inscriptions ...”

“... designed to exert checks and balances, the same aim has been pursued by different methods. Peter Catterall offers a nicely-judged account of the influence of religion, suggesting that the breakdown in the Conservatives’ traditionally cosy relationship with the Church of England has been exaggerated. Indeed, in his revisionist conclusion, he ...”

“... The Ink Garden. The engravings – four exotic Western flowers in a Chinese garden – portray St Peter in the Waves; the road to Emmaus; the men of Sodom; and the Virgin and Child. The memory images comprise two warriors fighting; a Muslim woman from the west of China; a farmer, sickle in hand; and a maidservant who, like the Virgin, carries a child. The ...”

“... Franklin Award. It was a decision that bewildered those few members of the literary world who had read the book, and which had the far more important effect of commanding the attention of a nation that takes its big books seriously. The upshot was that a significant group of literate, but not professionally literary, people found themselves reading this ...”

“... Homer and Hesiod and tragedy – and chooses The Art of Cookery. Two millennia on, we can still read Homer and Hesiod and a selection of tragedies, because these authors remained set books in schools, and as set books they were copied and recopied through the Middle Ages. But the cookbooks disappeared for ever, along with a mass of lighter literature: the ...”

“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... sits in piles In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Of course there are sage heads (Peter Porter’s, for instance) who will defend James’s serious verse-making as poised and Larkinesque. He is also (when he confines himself to what he knows) a fine literary critic. As a critic, James not only has his charm, he burns very ...”

“... messages, in particular. He makes it clear that the Florentine man in the piazza was competent to read ritual, to assess how far a cap was raised in salute, how far the Florentine government went to meet a particular visitor, how far away from the tribune in front of the Palazzo della Signoria the visitor dismounted – and would draw political conclusions ...”