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“... to Dadd’s madness, for the compositional congestion is not so different from Ford Madox Brown’s Work, and may perhaps also be compared to Dickens’s plots. A more important influence than photography, generally speaking, was that of book illustration, in which almost all the painters of fairy subjects engaged. Both the ornate title-page, with its ...”

“... histories and identities, can be transported to the public sphere without any adaptation. As Wendy Brown writes in Nihilistic Times:Just as nothing is more corrosive to serious intellectual work than being governed by a political programme (whether that of states, corporations, or a revolutionary movement), nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than ...”

“... Like many​ recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it ...”

“... Where do we go from here? It’s pretty clear that Gordon Brown doesn’t know and that Alistair Darling and the other members of the cabinet don’t either. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. It was much easier to predict that something nasty was going to happen than it is to know now when and how the nastiness will end ...”

“... paint suggests the sea and the sky. In 1928 he also painted a single Peasant, full size, with dark brown shoes, light brown and yellowish trousers, white hands – apparently gloved – and a red shirt, rather like a smock but drawn in around the waist. The peasant has a grey beard whose extremity is black, as is the hair on ...”

“... muddy underfoot, an illicit delight. It’s warm and windless, the stones of the abbey sodden and brown from the amount of moisture they’ve absorbed. Spectacular here are the toilet arrangements, the reredorter set above a narrow chasm with a stream still running along the bottom. Unique, though (or at least I haven’t seen another), is the tannery ...”

“... Britain’s Labour Party, which had spurned at least three opportunities to replace Gordon Brown with someone more palatable, smelled of exhaustion. Laws describes the various meetings that took place in the days following the election between the Lib Dem negotiating team and its Labour counterparts, to see if they could thrash out a deal. On the ...”

“... a lift ground imprinted by both fabric and Ziegler’s transfer paper – all before printing in brown ink on copperplate paper. Each step involved experiment and evaluation; the phrase ‘mixed media’ doesn’t do it justice.The exhibition catalogue helpfully provides close-ups of six different works, which recall, but cannot replace, the encounters that ...”

“... houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost ...”

“... by the time he was 21. In his admirable introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Christopher Brown writes that ‘it is impossible to over-emphasise the impact of Rubens’s new style on the young Van Dyck’ – the style, that is, of the pictures Rubens painted after his return from Italy in 1608. The demand for Rubens’s work went far beyond what one ...”

“... we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means ...”

“... is no colour, no person, no furniture, no painterly business. At one level they are plain, dull, brown pictures. But the room, the window and the river, disposed in that way, work on you. It isn’t the painting itself but the stage it offers the imagination that is effective. Not all the pictures in the book – it is also the catalogue of an exhibition ...”

“... is all of the showbusiness spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most ...”

“... Sir Peter Hall is a man of Notes. He is a director of plays who has become Director of the National Theatre. The skills of play directors are not those of performers (like his predecessor at the National, Lord Olivier). Play directors pride themselves on their ability to give what they call Notes. This sort of Note (scarcely recognised by dictionaries) is not the sort manual workers make, in notebooks or on notepaper: it is mouth work ...”

“... fictional device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 ...”