About 2,000 works trace the development of art from pre-dynastic Egypt to the early Renaissance in ways meant to evoke how the works were originally used.
And I was bowled over by the spontaneous eloquence the harsh landscape evoked, how the alchemy of wind, heat and sky could be so transformative.
And Tony Kushner's brilliant screenplay closes the gap between contemporary and 19th-century politics, all the while evoking how primitive 19th-century American life was, even in the White House.
Als, in drawing distinction between Baldwin and Coates, evokes how in the black imagination, the clarity and intensity with which Baldwin characterised black life led to fame that, still often separates Baldwin, the man, from his lived experiences.
What happened next poignantly evokes how much the space race meant to Americans of the day: People started mailing money to Rockwell to help pay off its "debt".
Mohammad Arif Ali's photograph of rain in Lahore captures the size and force of raindrops during the monsoons; the vivid colours at the edge of the frame also evoke how startlingly rinsed of dust the whole world looks.
One theme of the novel is the extent to which children were mistreated in the period evoked, how easily they were made receptacles for the anger and miseries of adults.
Since then, popular conceptions have been refined further — by the late Oliver Sacks, in his book "An Anthropologist on Mars" (1995); by Temple Grandin, the remarkable autistic animal-science professor, in "Thinking in Pictures" (1995); and by Mark Haddon, whose novel "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" (2003) vividly evoked how an autistic child might experience the world.
The book does, however, evoke how our lives can sometimes blur with the lives of others, how a stranger's features can occasionally ripple up the glass like an arpeggio.
The scene instantly evokes how deeply sexist even radical factions of society were at the time.
