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“... for the W Front?’ These were the questions he intended to put to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, then at the peak of his career as the most famous and sought after landscape designer of the day, who had been booked to make an inspection of Burton Constable and give his opinion of its ‘capabilities’ for improvement. Constable’s notes are a ...”

“... or thirty years, this has changed. ‘Garden history has been overly aristocratic,’ declared Jane Brown, whose Pursuit of Paradise (1999) proposed a social history of gardening that could be both ‘popular and nostalgic’. She took her inspiration from G.M. Trevelyan’s English Social History, referring to the delights of his medley of ...”

“... surprisingly, the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples: Lutyens ...”

“... was among the best. His painter/illustrator bilingualism is relevant to Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril, the exhibition the Courtauld has built round a picture from its own collection. (The exhibition closes on 18 September.) The same subject is shown in both portrait and poster modes. The Courtauld’s painting, ...”

“... and so I know how he will look when one day I lose control and crap on my skirt and he sees a brown smudge and smells it and knows my disgrace. Dispossessed, you see, of control and elegance and all the charms I had in abundance once.We both have a bit of a weight issue. She has been put on a diet by the vet: she has three restricted meals a day instead ...”

“... before the Carlyles’ Collected Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view the ...”

“... singer for a band, before going on to work with Bob Crosby (Bing’s brother) and then with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. She accepted the name but never warmed to it and even now, it’s said, rarely answers to it in her private life. ‘It sounds,’ she once said, ‘like I’m starring at the Gaiety Theater.’ Her brother, Paul, called her ...”

“... mouths off or is sullen, every once in a while. The man said, ‘You know why I’m here, Jane.’ Jane grabbed at the man where some soft flesh is, with some force, perhaps because so many persons were no longer in her life – not Titus or Roddy, Mamie or Cecelia Bouché – whom she had checked in with and needed ...”

“... symptoms of wailing. The trouble is that the radio is always on, even while we are reading about Jane Fairfax’s pianoforte, so that the hard electronic pips of the news and the drone of undefined voices impose a nervous, irregular punctuation upon the rational grace and subtle poise of Jane Austen’s sentences. Surely ...”

“... On 24 January, a Tuesday, Mr Cedric Brown, chief executive of British Gas, testified before the House of Commons Committee on Employment on the subject of his pay, which is £475,000 a year. In the course of a brisk and competitive exchange with MPs, he showed emotion at only one point, when he said this: I started at the bottom ...”

“... nor offshoots, but playful and original tributes to the work that’s set them off. With Jane Gardam’s latest novel the background book, and enriching ingredient, is Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Gardam is not new to the practice. The Summer after the Funeral (1973) has a heroine (aged 16 – it’s ostensibly a children’s book) who feels an affinity ...”

“... I had written a dissertation on the literary-critical legacy of the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ (Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A.B. Cook, turn-of-the-century classicists who had written on the connection between Greek myth and ritual and the origins of drama), and had then read a good deal of Frazer, who influenced the Ritualists ...”

“... Abbey has the crisp immediacy of a stage set while in the hands of Samuel Prout it is cosily brown and crumbly, accoutred with cows. Cotman’s Crowland hangs in watery mist. Like Turner in his detail of a massive Norman column from Holy Island suspended in a tiny sketch, Cotman could conjure up the poignant synecdoche of mighty fragments imbued as much ...”

“... Editor of the Times was responsible for my first denial. I was living in London with my wife, Jane Sheridan, and things were not going well. At University College, where I was teaching philosophy, I had become one of those figures whom students romanticise and sometimes pity. I didn’t have the proper qualifications, and the classes I gave were printed ...”

“... 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 ...”