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“... Thus the eventual union of the kingdoms was an odd arrangement negotiated on behalf of Queen Anne as Queen of England with herself as Queen of Scotland. The conventional English understanding of the Union of 1707 is that Scotland was incorporated within the English state by Act of Parliament, and that, in the words of the chief guru of English ...”

“... rejoined Jeannine and her son, who had moved to Nice. In 1942 Jeannine gave birth to a daughter, Anne, and, in September 1943, all four moved back to Paris, which was intellectually more exciting, though politically more dangerous.The war years were a period of true hardship for the Staëls, as for many others: work was very hard to come by, and so were ...”

“... hedge that wobbled like a long lime jelly in the ceaseless gales. The gas cooker, up on Queen Anne legs, was, Phyllis reckoned, Early Rayon Age. The one-and-a-half-piece suite almost certainly dated from the Middle Nylon Period, whereas the lino was undoubtedly Late Crimplene but it had got the hell bashed out of it by spike-heeled housewives of the same ...”

“... the nearly blank expressions, the eloquent intervals, the airy combination of dusty pink, chestnut brown, pale blue and white: all mark this painting as the earliest and perhaps the most interesting example of Piero’s influence on a great modern artist. In Young Spartans, which belongs to the same years and is now in the National Gallery, the group of elders ...”

“... conscientious daily witnessing is always coloured by the hindsight the reader brings to it. Like Anne Frank, Kruk had no knowledge either of his own future or of Hitler’s intentions towards the Jews (information comes erratically as rumour, often wrong), but unlike Frank, Kruk was a political activist, overwhelmingly concerned as a member of the Socialist ...”

“... outlook was the Butskellism which was the immediate legacy of the Second World War, when ‘Billy Brown of London Town’ told us all how to behave on the Underground, a means of transportation which Clement Attlee used, unaccompanied, when he visited Bindoff’s college on the Mile End Road. In spite of all its fulsomely royalist top-dressing, Tudor England ...”

“... or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the society philanthropist Lady Anne Tree ‘an oversize personality and character – rorty, Hogarthian and with exquisite understanding of character’, and in 2003 a writer in the Economist evokes a ‘Hogarthian throng of cheerful tradesmen and naughty ’prentice boys’. ‘March of the ...”

“... a braided rug, a tear in the screen door, a bust of Brahms, the water oiling itself between brown riverbanks. Under the tutelage of Mary Tucker, perhaps the first woman she ever loved romantically, she practised the piano for hours a day, repeating the same tricky passages until she was a general menace to the neighbourhood. After a bout of rheumatic ...”

“... information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All ...”

“... the title Channon had longed for.)For Channon, the House of Commons was a ‘club’, a ‘brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise’, and although he and Nicolson were never significant political players, both were keen observers. Nicolson became a devotee of Churchill’s, refusing to join in the chorus of praise when Chamberlain announced that he was ...”

“... my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the man he was when I was ten I could take him along to Cornelissen where I’m sure they could match his fingers in water, oil or acrylic. And it stirs another memory ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... it, and tonight, returning from the opera, we are mortified to find we are too late for supper. Anne Vaughan, our organiser, braves the kitchen and eventually a waitress takes pity on us and gives us some bread and ham and a bit of dog-eared salad which we take upstairs in plastic bags. ‘You must be very hungry,’ says a man in the lift. ‘What country ...”

“... Major E. A. Belcher – an eccentric tyrant, later caricatured by Agatha in The Man in the Brown Suit – to join, as financial adviser, a mission to the Dominions which would drum up publicity for the forthcoming Empire Exhibition of 1924. The mission left for South Africa on board the RMS Kildonan Castle in January 1922; Agatha went along for the ...”

“... way her hands rested down like that, exactly like the way my hands rested down on top of the dark brown lid of the till when there was no one there and nothing for me to do, so even though my small breasts did not resemble her large dusky-looking ones at all, my hands were like hers, exactly like hers, and I couldn’t help but believe that the Russian man ...”