Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

More fool them, you say. Others would agree, but they would be no closer to defining what art is.

Albert Einstein, a huge fan of Bach's, advised others to "listen, play, love, revere – and keep your mouth shut."

Do orchestral conductors do anything useful?

Alfted Hitchcock, who knew about such things, explained the difference between shock and suspense. Shock is when a bomb suddenly explodes. Suspense is when viewers see a bomb beneath a table where people are peacefully chatting. Shock is seeing the tops of telephone poles and trees poking above roiling waters on one side of the two-lane causeway between Morganza and Batchelor in Louisiana – particularly when the Mississippi River is on the other side of the road.

Suspense is imagining where that water will be in a few days.

Salingerspent ten years writing "The Catcher in the Rye" and "the rest of his life regretting it," observe David Shields and Shane Salerno in a new biography and related documentary.

Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it," declared Bertolt Brecht.

Herodotus describes flying snakes, fox-sized ants that unearthed gold dust, men with the heads of dogs and others with no heads at all whose eyes are set in their chests. But, as with reports of the intervention of the gods, he often distances himself by remarking that he is not sure if he can believe what he has been told.

What price the Louvre, the Parthenon or Yellowstone National Park?

Imagine a place run by film stars – vain, power-hungry, paranoid, adored.

Imagine they had been in charge not for the duration of a reality television series but for decades in a territory containing 72m people and one of the world's largest cities. It would be a disaster zone, wouldn't it?

Does Cannes need to shock?

Horace Walpole always regretted the export to Russia of the legendary British art collection, fearing that it would be "burnt in a wooden palace on the first insurrection".

But by a twist of fate, the sale saved the paintings. In 1789, ten years after they left, the Picture Gallery at Houghton was destroyed by fire.

"It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture," observed Thomas Edison in 1913, predicting that books would soon be obsolete in the classroom.

There is now nothing you can imagine that cannot be shown by Hollywood.

To judge a painter, you have to wait at least two centuries.