The exhibition Out of Chaos is a powerful dose of specific human experience, here presented almost exclusively in the form of portraits and group scenes. The selection comes almost entirely from the more than 1,300 works of art owned by Ben Uri Gallery, whose centenary commemoration this is; the gallery was founded in 1915, primarily to explore the work of Jewish artists in Britain. The majority of those in the collection are immigrants or first generation, with a few from beyond this island to expand on the Jewish experience. 

Whimsical, twee, sentimental. For those who love Joseph Cornell’s boxes, it’s hard to imagine that there are those who just don’t. “What? You mean you don’t like Cornell’s boxes because you think they’re whimsical? Twee? Sentimental?”

Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902) was an army officer and photographer, the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did – younger son, but of a certain social status – the East India Company’s army (the 12^th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so.

Feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feeeelings. Just like that Morris Albert hit of the Seventies for star-crossed lovers everywhere, I lost count of the number of times I heard that word in this Alan Yentob meets Jeff Koons love-in. Or, more precisely, “feeling” singular, since Koons, one of the most bankable artists in the world, was talking about the “feeeeling” aroused when you looked at one of his art works. 

The most celebrated reportage to come out the Vietnam War was Michael Herr’s Dispatches, rightly acclaimed as the most visceral journey into the dark heart of America’s first military defeat. But unlike all wars before it, Vietnam was a genuinely visual conflict, brought into the homes of the public via television and photojournalism. And among its most accomplished witnesses were two British photographers. The one everyone has heard of is Don McCullin, but his work was matched picture for picture by the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths.

The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor.  As one can infer, he was criminally insane, and despite a disarming interest in fairies, his life and work cannot be spun into a happy-ever-after narrative.

One of the earliest surviving sculptures by Barbara Hepworth is a toad made from a khaki-coloured, translucent stone; you can imagine it cool and heavy in your hand, not so very different from the animal itself, in fact. Made nearly 30 years later, the monumental sculptures carved from African guarea wood are almost unbearably touchable, each one with its dark, glossy exterior cracked open to reveal an inside as creamy as a conker. But while we are denied the pleasure of touching these objects, looking at Hepworth’s work is in itself a gloriously tactile experience.

The hook for Alan Yentob's portrait of the 86-year-old architect Frank Gehry was the initiation and progress of an enormous new building in a rough portside area of Sydney, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building for the business school of the University of Technology. It opened after nearly two years of construction, on time and on budget, last autumn. To commission it, the dean of the school, Ron Green, simply rang Gehry up, and Gehry replied with just four words: "I’m up for it." 

Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his conscience, and yet Claudius, conflicted, cannot pray. He must, therefore, remain a captive among the ghosts and the monsters where no light may fall.

There were female pioneers of photography before Christina Broom, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. And others have hidden their light under a bigger bushel: Vivian Meier's body of work remained stashed away only to be discovered after her death. Broom's importance is partly one of timing: she prowled the streets of London at a time of great historical significance. As suggested by Soldiers and Suffragettes, the title of a new exhibition and book celebrating her work, she was a witness to the struggle for universal suffrage and the First World War.