“... 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 ...”

“... What appealed to the young and to the many who had left the party in disgust during the Blair/Brown years – what appealed to the people who turned the campaign into a genuine social movement – was precisely what alienated the political and media cliques. Corbyn’s campaign generated a mass movement that renewed the base of the Labour Party – nearly ...”

“... with the feast of colour in the gallery. ‘Emerging from Turner’s heliocentric cathedral,’ Peter Conrad wrote in the Observer, ‘I felt I had cataracts: it takes time to re-accustom your dazzled eyes to the wan, monochrome mock-up we call reality.’ Turner, and his great advocate Ruskin, would surely have sighed with impatience at these ...”

“... leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore surrounding Cook’s first years in office, including the arms to Sierra Leone affair, diplomatic gaffes in India and Israel, and the embarrassingly public break-up of his marriage, Kampfner’s study is unduly ...”

“... Doris was​ in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope ...”

“... proportionate and proving again that longueurs have less to do with length than with pace, which Peter Carey controls like a master, thwacking his prose along with all the exuberant free energy of a boy thwacking a hoop with a stick. To Herbert Badgery – funny man, raconteur and compère extraordinary of Illywhacker – the notion that a book might seem ...”

“... simply stamped out; with the Pre-Raphaelites, there was indeed such a potential – he cited Madox Brown’s house, where ‘there were not only artists but also atheists, political refugees, vagrants: there was the kind of widening which was questioning the order of a much wider area’ – and this did link to Morris’s development. But Williams could not ...”

“... D). The As and the Bs are almost all white professionals and the Cs and Ds are entirely Black and Brown manual labourers. The quality of one’s food and accommodation is determined by whether an A, B, C or D is printed on your pass. Category As (me included) get a spacious multi-room cabin to themselves, with en suite bathroom, satellite TV and kitchen. Mine ...”

“... opening the discussion and Major Mayhew, Major Blackburn, Captain Chetwynd, Major Freeman, Mr Brown, Mr Gaitskell, Major Wyatt, Mr Durbin, Mr Willmott, Major Younger and Major Wells duly contributing, and the Chancellor summing up at the end. It would never have occurred to Gaitskell to say, as Wilson did – because he, Wilson, only hoped it was true ...”

“... picture is browner and hotter than later ones. The colours he came to make his own were pale beige-brown, dusty pinks and greens, cream which has a hint of skimmed-milk blue in it. There is sometimes just a little black. They are the colours (or what used to be the colours) of women’s underwear. In the 1928 still-life the tops of objects are pale; it might ...”

“... later is a downright delight. The angry and abusive restaurateur is still with us, as Craig Brown points out in his excellent short introduction, but John Fothergill, for all his eccentricities, snobberies and potty obsessions, had an endearing quality lacking in today’s kitchen boors; and for me this aspect was strongly confirmed by a rereading of ...”

“... Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris ...”

“... than Lancashire people, and it gets me down. Six thefts from the unit in the time we are here. Peter the caterer parks his van every night on St George’s Plateau, a well-lit spacious place in the centre of the city. Every night someone tries to break in. At breakfast in the hotel I ask for some brown toast. The ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”