Status: Closed file. Martial law imposed 13 December 1981, suspended 31 December 1982, formally lifted 22 July 1983. Legal reckoning incomplete. Subject: The imposition of martial law in the Polish People’s Republic, the machinery used to enforce it, and the disputed justification behind it. Background Solidarity was legalised in the autumn of 1980 under the Gdańsk Agreement, and within a year it had somewhere close to ten million members in a country of thirty-six million.

A brown horse stands in harness on the cobbles of the Wrocław Rynek, waiting for a fare that has not arrived yet. Behind it the Old Town Hall shows its east face, the gilt gable with its blind tracery, the astronomical dial with its gold sun, the stepped brick pinnacles running up either side. A kiosk sells souvenirs from a doorway at the base. A few people sit on the steps of the pillory column.

The chapel front is the part most people photograph without knowing what they are looking at. It sits at a corner off Rue Bellecordière, wedged between café awnings and a modern glass shopfront, and the inscription cut into the stone above the door reads LE GRAND HOSTEL DIEV. Old spelling, U carved as V in the Roman manner. Above the door there is a Pietà in relief, which is the dedication itself: Notre-Dame de Pitié.

On a November morning in 1981 the Queen Mother poured concrete into a column form on Lime Street. It was the sort of ceremony that earns a photograph and a paragraph in the trade press. It was also the start of the strangest office building in London, and the start of an argument that has still not been settled forty years after the underwriters moved in. Lloyd’s had run out of room.

The building on the corner does not look like a museum. It looks like what it was, a merchant’s house from the seventeenth century, cream render going grey at the base, a wide gable with brown timber under the eaves, shutters that still work. You come over Pont Marengo from the other side of town, you notice the red banner, and without the banner you would keep walking. That is the Musée Basque et de l’histoire de Bayonne.

The marble standing at the door of Palazzo Vecchio has been there since 1910, and most of the people photographing it have no idea. Michelangelo’s David left the square in 1873, moved on rails through the streets to the Galleria dell’Accademia, where it now stands under a purpose-built skylight at the end of a ticketed queue. What replaced it is a copy by Luigi Arrighetti, set in the exact spot the original held for 369 years.

Stand in the nave of almost any large Flemish church and look up at the tall windows. Saints in blue and gold, donors kneeling at the bottom, borders of painted foliage, everything glowing the way you were told medieval glass is supposed to glow. Then check the date. In a lot of cases it is somewhere between 1840 and 1900, and the building around it is the only genuinely old thing in your field of view.

Two words are legible on the granite from the pavement: SVATÝ VÁCLAVE. Saint Wenceslas, vocative case, the form you use when you are speaking to someone. The rest of the inscription runs around the pedestal and finishes as a request. Duke of the Czech land, our prince, do not let us perish, nor those who come after us. The line comes from a hymn that was already old in the fourteenth century, and it is carved on a monument finished in 1924, which tells you most of what you need to know about how Czechs have used this saint.

The view runs northwest across the roofs of the old town from high on the cathedral. The dome and the pair of towers in the middle distance belong to La Clerecía, the Jesuit college that is now the Pontifical University. The plaza at lower right is Plaza de Anaya, with the columned front of the Palacio de Anaya along its far side and the small domed church of San Sebastián sitting between them.

A man in a black jacket stands in front of it with his hands in his pockets. A woman walks past without looking. This happens all day, every day, in the French rooms on the second floor of the Met, and almost nobody stopping there knows they are looking at the most argued-over label in the building. The picture itself is calm enough. A young woman sits with a drawing board on her knees, in the white tunic every fashionable woman in Paris was wearing in 1801, red drapery bunched on a chair behind her.