“... formerly protected by a mount shows unaltered blue greys, which exposure to light has turned to brown over most of the picture area. The comparatively small number of pictures that can be reckoned to look much as they did when they were new can be used to measure change in others. Among the guilty fugitives, whose departure has made monotone what was ...”

“... the dance. There was a Princess Margaret Set, just as the Prince Regent had the Carlton House Set, Edward VII had the Marlborough House Set, and Edward VIII had the Fort Belvedere Set: three playboys, only one playgirl. It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig ...”

“... Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown and Henry Van Dyke (‘the friend of the family’). Apart from arranging for the girl to have met her fiancé at college, so that the gentleman in question remains a promising mystery to her relatives, Howells did little in his chapter to advance the ...”

“... A special 25th anniversary edition of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Consensus was published in March. Harvard University Press are advertising it together with Richard Lewontin’s new book, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment, presumably to let everyone know they’re not taking sides. Lewontin and Wilson, fiercely opposed to each other intellectually, used to have labs one directly above the other at Harvard (and weren’t on speaking terms) – an arrangement curiously reproduced in the design of the new ad ...”

“... The structural ironies of Edward Thomas’s life still condition his reputation. Just as he made a late poetic start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated ...”

“... decline periodisation has been one of the most influential, and provides the ground bass of Peter Brown’s memoir. It dates from the beginning of late antiquity, the period that Brown has done more than anyone to put on the historiographical map, and is owed to the prolific historian Cassius Dio, born of a senatorial ...”

“... mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves, the fragile, brown, rotting layers of previous deaths, layers that if deep enough and squeezed hard enough make coal as in Pennsylvania.’ Updike is an unconceited writer who makes grave things accessible. The work achieves a certain grandeur: it makes a perambulation of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... perpetuates their dispassionate perspectives and erases their victims all over again.Black and brown men and women were by the later 17th century hardly an uncommon sight in London, especially in the East End, with its mariners and merchants. Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the ...”

“... She spoke well-educated Spanish, and so did her niece, a splendid girl with the delicious golden-brown skin of the Moxos. San Ignacio, I learned, was deeply embarrassed by the company it kept: drug-dealing San Borja – where we ran into our cocaine-handlers – on one side, vulgar Trinidad and its big-city pretensions on the other. Founded by Jesuits to ...”

“... or because nothing much is demanded of them by their creator. The hero of The Folding Star, Edward Manners, was alive in his misery, as he tramped through Bruges in search of the object of his desire, young Luc Altidore. Alex Nichols suffers in rather similar ways in The Spell, but it is difficult to care about him as one cared for ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... to compare with Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in an Convex Mirror’ and ‘Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid” ’. The origin of ‘A Wave’ may be the passage about dreams in ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘They seemed strange because we couldn’t actually see them ... ’ As in ‘Self-Portrait’, Ashbery’s style is loose-limbed, musing, discursive unrhymed ...”

“... in the water, which seems attractively blue. That is most peculiar because we both remember it as brown. But what mattered would not have photographed anyway: the water was alive with darting fish of all sizes, and we knew that there were snakes in it, and alligators, and much larger caymans. It was only the fish that worried us – piranhas are abundant in ...”

“... In Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, the narrator contemplates the words of passion used by Edward Ashburnham to a young girl, Nancy, and his need to speak them, and what happened once these words were spoken aloud: ‘It was as if his passion for her hadn’t existed; as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke them, created the ...”