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“... account of her difficulties in her first job, as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Gordon Brown’s deputy, are typical of the descriptions she gives of her ministerial career as a whole. She stresses her own inadequacy and failure in a way it’s almost impossible to imagine a man’s political memoir doing. Labour was trying to avoid saying that the ...”

“... 22 paintings for the Mercedarians, including two of his most famous works, the Apparition of St Peter to St Peter Nolasco (now at the Prado) and the Martyrdom of St Serapion (now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut).As Jonathan Brown puts it in the catalogue that accompanied the ...”

“... of excising his own comments might have improved the book by removing passages like: ‘Wendy Brown came back and said: you’ve got to see that, it’s the most interesting thing that’s happened in photography for years. So we got straight in the car. And I must have told half a dozen people, key people ... ’ ...”

“... accumulation of worthwhile, but mostly marginal, gestures. The first was the decision by Gordon Brown to hand responsibility for monetary policy over to unelected officials at the Bank of England – supposedly balanced by the subsequent removal of the Bank’s unhappy role in regulating financial services. This was presumably the kind of thing Tony Blair ...”

“... Speaking of a piece in gypsum alabaster, Penny writes: ‘The stone is white but with a few brown streaks in it and a network of translucent veinings, giving it an organic appearance, even more so than that of ivory, and this, together with its softness, makes it an almost alarming material in which to see naked flesh represented.’ The materials of ...”

“... obsessions, as of Sir Keith Joseph at an Annual Conference, ‘wearing one black and one brown shoe’. How many of the Thatcherite changes are permanent, how many ephemeral? There is some precedent in Conservative history for almost every aspect of today‘s party. Patriotism (or nationalism) has been there from the beginning. Populism goes back for ...”

“... book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers (1998). The first resembles a documentary; the second is more like a novel in the sense of being more artfully shaped and ...”

“... Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the ...”

“... eight Impressionist exhibitions had taken place five years before. And what was Matisse painting? Brown still lifes. He said that the first time he really saw Impressionist paintings was when the Caille-botte legacy was exhibited in 1897. Remarking on the similarity between Matisse’s description in old age of his early struggles and those of other ...”

“... in Maidenhead in 1923 (‘suicide’ according to Granny). My mother was then four, and my uncle, Peter, was six. Granny took her children to live in Switzerland, in search of ‘mountain air’ to cure my uncle’s incipient tuberculosis. There, she met a retired lieutenant-colonel in the Indian Army named Bertram Price Ellwood, who married her in ...”

“... know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises ...”

“... values. Despite its neo-gothic title, The Haunted House betrays no hint of anachronism. Rebecca Brown explores a daughter’s fantasies about her father and mother, and the manifold emotional damage they have caused her, with poetic feeling and a sustained and controlled intensity. Robin Daley’s father was a US Navy pilot, constantly away from home and ...”

“... at the port of London: a page for every person in England. Most of it was probably low-quality brown paper used as a packing material to protect foodstuffs and ceramics as they juddered along cartways into the city. A small amount, some 3500 sheets, was the ornamental paper used for decorations at feasts and known as papiri depicti (Chaucer refers to ...”

“... ideologies, and there’s a problem when they don’t. What, then, do we really want from them? Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void offers some disturbing answers to this question. We remain in the dark about the strategies Mair might have recommended to address the crisis of Western democracy – he died of a heart attack in 2011 before his book was finished ...”

“... no, I can quite see how it might fail a seriousness test. (One can almost hear the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British ...”