“... drawings and paintings – a good Warburgian, perhaps. In his drawings on canvas using the reddish-brown pigment known as caput mortuum, Kitaj comes closest to Walter Sickert as a painter of photographs. His images of baseball players, including Stanky and Berra at St Petersburg, from 1967, on show at Piano Nobile, are the equivalents of the music hall ...”

“... enjoy?) the condition are known – include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Nabokov and Hockney. John Harrison’s Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, a scientific and historical study, is due from Oxford in March. The condition has been dismissed by at least one anonymous ‘notable scientist’ as ‘romantic neurology’, but in the foreword to ...”

“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few ...”

“... they are divided over the desirability of hair under the arms. Most Mende have skin that is dark brown, but they prefer copper or jet-black, the colour of the mask and they dye their hair black with indigo. Conversely, girls undergoing initiation paint their faces with white clay. They are, like most African peoples, obsessively clean by Western ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... under the guidance first of the great W.E.B DuBois, then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the task of reclamation about two generations earlier than the Caribbean writers who identified – if one can nowadays put it that way – with Europe, specifically England. Their literary ...”

“... Liberalism, and many of its founders’ lives reflected the eclecticism of that old cause. Gavin Brown Clark ran away from his bourgeois Glasgow home at thirteen, living in India, Australia and London before working as a surgeon in Edinburgh; by the 1880s, this ‘inveterate joiner of organisations’ had become dedicated to temperance, land reform and the ...”

“... of the boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, but it remains a memorable dish, floating with its brown meats and its yellow meats at the solar plexus of the novel, emblem of Mrs Ramsay’s martyrdom on the family altar, but also of her detachment, for it is not she but the cook who has taken two days to prepare it in the kitchen. Hazlitt remarks in an essay ...”

“... Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the LFF, or Latest Foreign Fraud. By this he meant any thinker from abroad (Paris, nine times out of ten) whose alembicated ideas were being taken up with more excitement than he thought they – or, I daresay, any ideas – were worth ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... he strikes the warm-hearted line about the holiday pursuits (this was in the 1930s) of the vulgar Brown family:                                with allowances For this and that and little income tax, They probably earn seven times as much As poor old Grosvenor-Smith. But who will grudge Them this, their wild spontaneous ...”

“... world Perry’s exhibition looks back beyond. Many of the paintings – Jack Smith’s black-grey-brown After the Meal, Ruskin Spear’s dusky Hammersmith Broadway, Victor Pasmore’s misty Riverside Gardens, Paul Nash’s bleak East Anglian sea wall in Promenade – are sadder and more solemn than the photographs. Sickert’s ...”

“... Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike – agree to international oversight of his chemical arsenal – the stalled march to war became a headlong retreat. Obama appears to have found a way out of the hole he had dug for himself, with a helping hand from Putin ...”

“... memorialist or seanchaidh, whose stories were edited into a book by the great Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell. Her words had gone on buzzing and irking in a corner of my brain. Most sources are agreed that the people left Pabbay and the last two islands in the chain, Mingulay and Berneray, quite freely, in a final despair at the harshness of the ...”