“... somewhere came a transistor radio’s plastic sizzle. There it was again: all the roofs, and the brown life of the river, and the grey cathedral, which stands over the town watching it, and its two enormous towers, each of them showing a dark, louvred belfry – when I was a boy I used to think of those belfries as God’s lungs. Two of the saints of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Man with a Guitar appears not so far removed from traditional Chinese painting: the uniform brown surface, delicately broken by dabs and washes; the character of the brushmarks, which convey as much as, if not more than, the elusive, unfinished subject matter. The incorporation of words into Cubist paintings and collages has a distant ancestor in the ...”

“... colours of a bruise as it appears and disappears: black to purple to blue to clotted burgundy to brown to mustard yellow. I had several collections of near-identical garments: two yellow skirts, four black skirts, three stripy tops, three pairs of scuffed black ballet flats, and a grey cardigan I wanted to lose. Did I think I was building a style or was I ...”

“... been incorrectly diagnosed and of the wrong answers half had come from specialists in cardiology. Peter Fleming’s absorbing history does not contain this sobering information, but then it stops at 1970 – and on an upbeat note, with the introduction of cyclosporin, the immunosuppressant drug, and an improved outlook for heart transplant patients. What ...”

“... very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough guy’ (a mark of approval). Only Gordon Brown – ominously for him – is ‘a strange guy’. Other character assessments are equally breezy. ‘She is a great person, Tessa [Jowell], just a gem.’ Mandela can be ‘fly as hell’. Princess Anne ‘does a huge amount of largely unnoticed charity ...”

“... the Gaedhaltacht areas of Donegal, out of apprehension about its Anglicising effect. George Mackay Brown’s Orkney is an unfamiliar, off-shore locality in which everything seems a little richer through being both concentrated and chancy. How long can its distinctive character survive? It was endangered as long ago as the last quarter of the 19th century, the ...”

“... assumed. In Caravaggio’s early paintings clearly-defined areas of flesh colour, buff and sandy brown are contrasted with neat patterns of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... partly built up with masoned blocks, its steel-bar door locked. Through it we can see a thick brown crucifix on a rough-hewn plinth and a flagged floor. The sides and slanting roof of the cell are raw grey rock. In this refuge, this living grave, S. Alessandro Falconieri slept, prayed, shivered and hungered, around 1310. The mountain is ringed with these ...”

“... her memoirs or a contributor to the Daily Telegraph correspondence column: As I sipped the nut-brown brew I reflected that there are still some things that we do incomparably better than other nations if only we could stop this Gadarene rush down the slope of trans-Atlantic replication ... I actually saw her embracing her friend Margaret in a manner that I ...”

“... not that far) from Dalí’s charades of transgression, one man shits, one man slumps in a shit-brown blanket, one man wipes his backside. Which way does authenticity lie? Which way art?’ Authenticity now lies, it would seem, with purely mechanical records like CCTV clips. But the gallery’s Midas touch can turn those too into art, and in the process ...”

“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Literature should be naked,’ Peter Stamm writes. Words should never obscure the story, ‘its warmth, its form, its vitality’. It’s form that critics in Germany and his native Switzerland are talking about when they compare Stamm to Raymond Carver. Take ‘The True Pure Land’, one of his more ‘naked’ stories ...”