In a collection of essays entitled Art Can Help, the photographer Robert Adams writes about images that evoke beauty without irony or sentimentality, proposing that ‘it is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it’.

In about 1923, John Craske began to make pictures of the sea and the coastline, painting on cardboard, wrapping paper, doors, mantelpieces, jugs, and crockery. He also made toy boats. Later, when he was not able to paint, he made embroideries while sitting upright in bed, supported by cushions. Their subjects are the same as those of his paintings – fishing boats tossed about in rough seas or beached on the shore, a lighthouse illuminating a ship in a storm, sailors being rescued by breeches buoy.

Cheapjack, first published in 1934, is Philip Allingham’s account of the years he spent travelling around markets and fairgrounds in England.

‘Four Roads’, by the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, was filmed as an experiment during the first pandemic lockdown, using out-of-date stock and an old 16mm camera…

Gef announced to the Irvine family, whose house he inhabited and who were the only people ever to have seen or spoken to him, that he was an ‘earthbound spirit’ and a ‘ghost in the form of a mongoose’.

‘An Egoless Practice’, an article in ‘The Paris Review’ about a book called Tantra Song, is introduced with a description: ‘rendered by hand on found pieces of paper and used primarily for meditation, the works depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear departure from Tantric art’s better known figurative styles’…

Thought-Forms - A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, published in 1901 by the Theosophical Society in London, was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, two leading figures in that organisation…

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner’s recent novel, was published in his 87th year; its epigraph, borrowed from the Italian theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, is ‘Time is ignorance’…

‘Get Back’, the new edit of the 1970 film documentary ‘Let It Be’, takes up their story when the four Beatles, in different ways, had become a little tired and disillusioned…

Fred Herzog liked the ‘grittiness’ and vitality of old Vancouver, then more obviously a port and frontier town, and his plain and evocative photos now read as elegiac images of a lost era in which people acted and lived differently, and where the streetscapes, while often rundown and melancholic, had undoubted character…

The Gospel of Mary, written by an unknown author in the 2nd century CE and lost for over 1500 years, was discovered in Cairo as a fragmentary copy in Coptic translation and brought to Berlin in 1896…

‘Authenticity’, writes Christopher C. King, is founded on social and musical knowledge that is related to place, past, and shared memory, and which creates continuity of perception and understanding…

Silhouettes have often been used in the cinema, but never more ingeniously than in Lotte Reiniger’s silent films…

Shortly before his unexpected death, when asked by an interviewer where he felt most at home, W. G. Sebald replied that it was on Île Saint-Pierre…

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds…

George Smart, born in 1774, lived and worked in Frant, near Tunbridge Wells; there are early 19th century prints that depict his shop in the main street and one that shows Smart outside his premises, offering his wares to people in passing carriages…

In late November, 1970, All Things Must Pass, George Harrison’s melancholy devotional masterpiece, was first released…

Kelly Reichardt’s outstanding First Cow has much in common with her earlier films: it is as tender and unobtrusive as Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, and like Meek’s Cutoff, also set in 19th century America, it is about people on the move who are living under extreme pressure, both physical and psychological.

Not long ago the Tate Gallery announced the acquisition of an archive of about five thousand sketches, drawings, and artworks by Ithell Colquhoun, which was added to the occult work that had been bequeathed to the same institution by the artist. The National Trust, the original owners of the archive, decided that it would make sense to have them housed in the one place.

Sinikka Langeland’s new record, Wolf Rune, is stripped back to its essentials - her voice and the kantele - and among its sources of inspiration are the ‘rune songs’ of Finland, which are based on epic, lyric, or shamanistic folk poetry.