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“... He had auburn hair, with one of those patches of white that do not always signify age; and he had brown eyes. But it is too late to describe him. The reader has his own picture of Bran by now. I ought to have done it earlier.’ The final piece of dialogue in the book more or less spells things out: ‘Bran has fleas.’ ‘Of course he has fleas! Haven’t ...”

“... For his half-niece Anne Wharton, writing immediately after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes ...”

“... about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ability. Lauretta Ngcobo (a contemporary South African novelist) has as much in common with Anne Bradstreet as with Athol Fugard – if not more. And Anne Bradstreet has as much in common with Ifeoma Okoye (a Nigerian writer of children’s stories) as with Cotton Mather, or more. Riding alongside is the assumption ...”

“... mole, she begs for the boy to come and rescue her. He is killed on the way, but a huge, red-brown dog arrives and rips the scoundrel’s neck out. It’s hard not to look for political allegories, the killer dog as an expression of the Revolution which is itself part of some sort of savage unconscious. Teffi must have been aware of similarly dark ...”

“... in a precarious situation. Anna Maria insisted that paid work was unbecoming to her daughters, so Anne said nothing about her decorative art job while Charlotte quietly earned a little money from the stories and articles she published in magazines (she made her debut in 1894 in the first volume of The Yellow Book). The top floors of their house in Gordon ...”

“... on. He reads from a sheet of paper, first standing up, then sitting down. He walks out into the brown and dusty desert. Everyone around him is armed. In the tape’s last 20 minutes, he sits cross-legged next to Mohammed Atta. The two of them laugh and joke, a machine-gun propped on the wall behind them. At one point, al-Jarrah looks away from the camera ...”

“... From an elevated and distant position the queen looks down approvingly, her loyal ghillie John Brown, leader of the queen’s pony, at her side. John Grant, the head keeper at Balmoral, is on his knees in shirtsleeves, one hand on the stag’s antlers, while the other reaches for his sgian-dubh, with which he will gralloch the beast. The painting on the ...”

“... beautiful Jessica gives quite a lot of thought to her appearance: she tells us about her ‘huge, brown almond-shaped eyes’ and unconvincingly disparages the ‘tarnished gold’ of her ‘curly, cuprous aureole’. But she is also inclined to deepness, explaining that ‘the Jew is the quintessential exile, like the artist,’ and that Venice is a ‘city ...”

“... 1860s: a truly English middle-class domestic architecture had to await the advent of the ‘Queen Anne’ style. Dr Girouard is entertaining on all of this, illuminating about the obscure complexities of country-house planning, and, above all, readable and consistently interesting: the book is a classic of unpedantic scholarship. This new edition has been ...”

“... and last part, where she is exploited sexually by a bestial ship’s captain. The woman pirate Anne Bonny, an arch-aggressor in this aggressively male world, is an appropriate instrument to resolve the plot’s complexities. Even so, salvation seems a long time coming, though, to do Ms Jong justice, no longer than in some of Masefield’s 18th-century ...”

“... early​ 1860s, Edgar Degas made a copy of Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Louisa Georgina Augusta Anne Murray. The original, now in Kenwood House, is thought to have been completed between 1824 and 1826 and shows the four-year-old goddaughter of the Duke of Wellington prancing before her audience like a 19th-century Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy ...”

“... contend with. She mentions monks’ habits, for example, but makes nothing of them. She mentions Anne Boleyn’s headdress, for no obvious reason. She mentions the gothic futurist hip-hop artist RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ. She mentions the Queen of Hearts. (But she doesn’t mention the King of Hoods, Kenny in South Park.) In the end it all gets a bit much. Also, the ...”

“... talented work, both as a character portrayal and as a construction. Berthe is wearing a plum-brown velvet coat over which her dark brown hair falls; underneath, there is a red blouse whose colour is picked up in her thin red headband. The tonality is generally dark, except for two fierce slashes of light. On the ...”