“... minister has come to office with so little experience of government or anything else. Fettes, St John’s College, Oxford, Lincoln’s Inn and a few years on the opposition benches in the House of Commons are a preparation of limited value for going into the ring in the world of lies and violence with the likes of Dick Cheney, Gerry Adams, Vladimir ...”

“... was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the Chinese ...”

“... The George Eliot entry does not mention her brother Isaac, Charles Bray, Charles Hennell or John Chapman. Lewes gets just eight words (‘a married man unable to divorce his wife’). Sartre similarly gets no more than a dismissive sentence in the de Beauvoir entry. Beauvoir’s book on her mother’s death is cited, but not Adieux, her farewell to ...”

“... he’s gone and joined this weird sect. He sits in a cave with his guru, a batty old bugger called John and scribbles on scrolls stuff to scare you while the rabbi goes rabbiting on. He seems dead to us does my brother. He’s been so thoroughly brainwashed by John ‘I look in your eyes,’ said our mother ‘But the bright ...”

“... you while you are making a ludicrously maladroit attempt to swaddle a stolen painting in brown paper. Fly into a sulk. Bundle the poor girl into your car, and when she protests, silence her with a hammer, noting, as you do so, that its impact on her skull is like hitting clay or hard putty. (You are brilliantly obsessed by details.) Drive thirty ...”

“... administrations. And unpopular though the government is, it is nowhere near as unpopular as John Major’s was. Furthermore, some of its policies are so irrational and alarming – particularly, of course, those towards the Middle East and the United States – that they are put to one side, so to speak, regarded as a mad aberration, which means that ...”

“... however, Young thought that the Early Victorian period had fallen into contempt, and by 1917 John Morley’s Recollections confessed that ‘critics today are wont to speak contemptuously of the mid-Victorian age.’ Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in May the following year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values ...”

“... and is probably the greatest novelty. In some respects it is a very odd compilation. Back in 1960 John Russell Brown wrote an article, celebrated in the trade, in which he argued against the value of old-spelling Shakespeare, saying among other things that the amount of ‘silent alteration’ an editor would have to ...”

“... you can sense their sharpness, and how risky it was to hold the stem. There is a large brown birthmark on the hand holding the rose. The texture of the birthmark is rougher than the porcelain-smooth white of her upheld hand. The flower is a pale pink bud just beginning to open. This discreet opening is a contrast to the cleft that slashes apart the ...”

“... called Animals, and in one edition, I think in 1968, a thrilling article by the ornithologist John Gooders described how he’d seen two hundred species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those ...”

“... we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means ...”

“... of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon Brown’s Fifeshire accent would simply have said to himself, “Labour”; now, he says: “Scottish.” The lopsided devolution settlement has created a sense that the Scots are having their cake and yet guzzling away at it.’ The newspapers accuse a Scottish ...”

“... disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the detail of mossy roofs, leaves and branches is wonderful. There are pen and wash drawings on brown paper which bring to mind Ruskin’s Alpine landscapes. Ruskin praised him only once, but handsomely, in the 1846 edition of the first volume of Modern Painters, where he wrote that Palmer’s ‘studies of foreign foliage especially are beyond all praise ...”