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“... aim to give, and granted its scope and its plan, it could not have given, the kind of picture that Peter Brown has given, in his life of Augustine and other books about early Christianity, of what it was like to be someone at a certain date in Alexandria or in Carthage, wondering what to believe. It is not, in that sense, a work of history, as distinct ...”

“... which are recognisable as elements because you can imagine the way Cotman would have made a neat brown patch out of the over-grazed meadow you are looking at, or the way Francis Towne would have constructed a neatly penned crag on the basis of the rock that overhangs it. There is pleasure, too, in the mechanics of the business: in looking for your own way ...”

“... and artists today, from Australia to Brazil. It also sums up the central argument of Jonathan Brown’s new book The Golden Age of Painting in Spain, which emphasises Spain’s cultural dependence on foreigners. The author claims that even in its so-called ‘Golden Age’, here defined as the period 1480-1700, Spain remained ‘on the periphery of ...”

“... sarongs – is all that you may need. If not, cuisine comes next: Asian takeaway in confidential brown paper bags. Only when ready come out in public: sitting at roadside stalls proudly becoming what you eat, stir-fry and rice, and more rice, in small civilised portions. Now you must use only chopsticks, or the washed right hand alone, and rise always from ...”

“... across the diagonal of the room, is topped with the remnants of a crown of leaves, now crisp and brown, and terminates with a root-bole, round and heavy, like the knob of a club. The paintings resemble sheets from a herbarium where specimens – palm leaves, but other plants as well – have been mounted by a deranged botanist who has attacked them with ...”

“... be revised and rethought in the light of this book. It reinforces the insights of such scholars as Peter Brown and Meyer Schapiro, who have tried to draw us out of our Rome-centred, Classics-centred view of the past. It truly does what Eliot said every masterpiece did: alters, if ever so slightly, every single work in the ...”

“... and in each of the synoptic gospels he commissions his disciples to do the same – the historian Peter Brown suggests it was the ‘most highly rated activity’ of the early Church. The ancient Mediterranean was populated by wandering holy men and charismatic healers, for whom exorcism was something between medicine and miracle. Church leaders who are ...”

“... at face value. But might they be put to the test? In his recent memoir, Journeys of the Mind, Peter Brown writes that, when researching the medieval practice of ducking, in which a suspected witch was thrown into a body of water and pronounced innocent if she sank to the bottom, he threw himself fully clothed into various municipal pools. Since ...”

“... the centre to the periphery. It is only in the last few years, thanks to scholars such as Jonathan Brown and some of his Spanish colleagues, such as Julian Gallego, that the art of 17th-century Spain is beginning to be seen again in its intellectual, social and political context. Jonathan Brown is the author of monographs on ...”

“... Standing in such a tradition, the title chosen by William Keegan, The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown, is entitled to its whimsical flourish, and he duly begins with a monitory epigraph from Titian’s Allegory of Prudence: ‘The Present does well to profit from the Past, lest Future conduct go astray.’ A respected financial journalist with excellent ...”

“... Peter Doig painted Echo Lake in 1998. A man stands on the far side of a stretch of dark water. He is quite a way off, but you can see that he wears a white shirt and a dark tie. His hands are raised to his face. Is it to keep the light out of his eyes as he looks at you? Or is it to project his voice as he shouts? A police car, lights on, is parked behind him ...”

“... two other series the picture surface is divided horizontally into upper, darker areas of black or brown and lower, paler ones of grey or brown. In both the painted area is surrounded by a narrow white border. Differences between pictures that are structurally very similar and black, near-black or muddy greys and ...”

“... not imply that it is just one explanation among equals, is a bit like finding a video booth in St Peter’s where you can listen to cardinals defending the virgin birth. It may have seemed necessary because this is a joint exhibition to which the American Museum of Natural History and other US institutions have contributed. The voices are from America, where ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... number of them as books they knew, or books they have on their shelves, mellowing into crisp, brown-edged age. Novelists are notoriously sensitive about covers. J.D. Salinger won’t allow anything but type – the memory of one vilely inappropriate cover (a third-rate Saturday Evening Post illustration on For Esmé with Love and Squalor) gives a notion ...”