There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.

Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.

But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.