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“... the centre to the periphery. It is only in the last few years, thanks to scholars such as Jonathan Brown and some of his Spanish colleagues, such as Julian Gallego, that the art of 17th-century Spain is beginning to be seen again in its intellectual, social and political context. Jonathan Brown is the author of monographs on ...”

“... ass-wearing blokes eager to accept the hand that fate had dealt us and play with it. Now, brown sorrow is the correct livery for when we go out. It’s important to find a copy of the reproduction and send or sell it back to them, ‘and with milk’. That was the nicest thing about them, happy birthday. For it you got a mandate? Because I like it ...”

“... the basis of her programme, and it was this that attracted Tony Blair. Together with Gordon Brown and the rest of the small group that created New Labour, Blair understood that the rise of Thatcher was not an aberration, as nearly everyone on the left believed. A rupture had occurred in British politics, and if Labour was to survive as a party of ...”

“... writing in the Mail, thinks the way to understand Damian McBride’s relationship to Gordon Brown is by analogy with the Third Reich. McBride didn’t need to take direct orders from his boss because he already understood the violence that Brown wished on his enemies. The underling was working towards the ...”

“... meet me in the town, Its chill and its salinity that pricks And tightens up a skin that’s nicely brown: Those stars we hope to drink beneath tonight Are pledged to North America, that white Deliberative brilliance even now The obsolescent hardware of The ...”

“... better than anyone the new rules of political fabrication. He comprehensively outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown in Manchester by being truer both to himself and to the spirit of contemporary politics in the way he stretched the truth. Blair was sincere in the lies he told. Brown, by contrast, came across as a straightforward ...”

“... from Damascus. In his magnificently thorough and consistently illuminating new life, Frederick Brown locates the book’s origins as early as 1839, when Flaubert was 18 years old and a schoolboy in Rouen (the city where he was born and in or very close to which he lived for the rest of his life). Young Gustave was slow learning to read – a slowness from ...”

“... of kerosene and febrile cheer and smoke, I rotate my jaws on something crisp and fat. A dark brown cup of Christmas jollity is clinking on a poster. Through the window, browning green forever, sits an Asda. book now! At least the fir tree’s right way up. Taking refuge in a middle stall of three where silence magnifies my urination I piddle like a monk ...”

“... to the simply intolerable: look no further than It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton. But Gordon Brown doesn’t need to write a job application. The spavined and gelded Parliamentary Labour Party has just anointed him by acclamation, and he thus becomes the first Labour leader in more than seventy years – and the first prime minister in more than fifty ...”

“... of the bestseller list. Another book certain to do that is the Diaries of Edwina Currie (Little, Brown, £18.99). An earlier publicity coup of Currie’s involved splitting up with her husband at the same time as she published a novel called She’s Leaving Home. Anyone who might have thought that was a bit shameless will have to recalibrate their sense of ...”

“... of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first presidential candidate in forty years who hasn’t secured the evangelical vote. H.L. Hunt, according to one of his enemies, ‘would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was ...”

“... figure in this transformation. But he is not alone. His key colleague is, also obviously, Gordon Brown, with whom there are – Old Labour stalwarts dreaming of a New Jerusalem after the Blair to Brown handover, please note – plenty of personal differences but almost no ideological ones. And then there are the figures ...”

“... battledress he had cadged off some ex-army student, did so very consciously. But Amis wore his brown tweed jacket and cherry-red polo sweater without giving the impression of having taken any thought about them. He was seeking contributions for Oxford Poetry. As editor he printed long pieces of his own, strangely dithyrambic, almost Swinburnian, and about ...”

“... some freshly-picked peas, delicious, piling them into a mound on her lap. Her sister fills a large brown bowl with blueberries and an arrangement of little lilac petals. I wonder who that is in the mirror, tossing her blonde curls. It must be time for a drink – it is! She dips the tip of her tongue into her martini, and the repetition of this gesture is her ...”

“... Party’s founding fathers anyway. (Both things are more or less right.) It is probably because John Smith, who led the party from July 1992 until his death in 1994, would not be prematurely enrolled in New Labour that the depiction of him here is so bleak. The man who might have led Labour to victory, thus bypassing the possibility of a Blair ...”