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“... apron-strings. With hindsight, the reason they feel different is clear: the Cubists are brown with verticals and horizontals emphasised. The Futurists are gaudy and things whiz about. The Tate exhibition (it has already been seen in Paris and Rome) puts things in perspective by sandwiching Italian Futurism between Cubism and Cubo-Futurist variations ...”

“... world Perry’s exhibition looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than the photographs. Sickert’s ...”

“... Mourjou is mainly cow pasture and fodder crops. The livestock there, too, is handsome: dark red-brown Salers cows, each herd with its pale Charolais bull and buff calves. In both Mourjou and Santa Cristina the fields run to the edge of steep valleys and gullies. Look at the fields in all three places and you realise how agriculture (unlike gardening) limits ...”

“... one male nude: it shows a friend, Angus Neil, lying on a couch, very skinny, painted in slabs of brown and buff. In 1955, it seems, a woman painting a male nude was worth prurient attention from the press. A newspaper printed her address and she was bothered by offers to pose. She didn’t do another nude.) She described her relation to her child models in ...”

“... he liked. Styles may change, but some things just keep coming back. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1984 Brown Spots (Portrait of Andy Warhol as a Banana) is a really nice picture, if a little mysterious – the best the catalogue can do is suggest that the partly peeled banana with Warhol’s ‘trademark shock of whiteish-grey hair suggests an affectionate joke ...”

“... on principle, practising conviction politics with missionary zeal at governess pitch. For Peter Riddell, writing elsewhere, Thatcherism is ‘essentially an instinct, a sense of moral values and an approach to leadership rather than an ideology, an expression of Mrs Thatcher’s upbringing in Grantham, her background of hard work and family ...”

“... among dark green leaves. A flock of starlings – some black, glossy and speckled, some buff-brown juveniles – land and scramble, mostly unseen, among the leaves which rustle and move with their comings and goings. They peck at the fruit. A pair of wood pigeons – soft grey backs, pink-buff breasts, white collars – land and cling unsteadily to twigs ...”

“... of Vulcan (the former now in the Escorial, the latter in the Prado), mark the transition from brown to bright and from marked chiaroscuro to more even lighting. Some of the strangeness and intensity of earlier compositions has gone. Velázquez has become more international European, less provincial Spanish. The figures (all male) are close to being ...”

“... a remarkably large proportion of his work. He started late. Onement I, a modestly sized upright brown canvas divided by a vertical vermilion band, the picture he reckoned to be the first in which he found his distinctive voice, was painted in 1948, when he was well into his forties. He had his first one-man show in 1950.His pictures are easy to recognise ...”

“... an independence referendum – ‘Bring it on,’ she said – but she was slapped down by Gordon Brown, under the advice of Alexander’s brother Douglas. Within months she was out of office, forced to resign after failing to declare a £950 donation from a Jersey-based businessman. For the SNP, even defeat has turned out to be a blessing: within weeks of ...”

“... rather dogged about some aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite work ethic. In April 1855, Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary about the drawing for Work: ‘This is now to me a species of intoxication,’ he exclaims. ‘When I drew in the poor little vixen girl pulling her brother’s hair, I quite growled with delight.’ This entry is interesting because it ...”

“... button-box. The large and frailer buttons Rise to the surface like a spume, like round rafts Or brown waterlilies with symmetrical perforations, The little hard brutal berrylike buttons sift, the metal studs And poppers lie in their mineral strata far below; The bubbles of bone and metal, the focusing Devices of dress, for where it parts and fastens The ...”

“... round cheeks, the same dominant nose and, because it is carved from dark wood, the same dark brown colour. But, as a print in the exhibition shows, this carving is also very like iconic photographs of the Queen Empress. The knees-together, forward-facing pose – a pose from Egyptian sculpture – was sustained in Africa. It happened to fit very well ...”

“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by ...”

“... a conversion I understand we owe more to the cinema than the Church. He was very good as Father Brown.’ The other Alec (McCowen) has arrived at his state of grace after a year or two reading the Gospel of St Mark to hugely appreciative audiences in theatres rather than churches. In Personal Mark he writes about the life of Jesus, as seen through his own ...”