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“... a conversion I understand we owe more to the cinema than the Church. He was very good as Father Brown.’ The other Alec (McCowen) has arrived at his state of grace after a year or two reading the Gospel of St Mark to hugely appreciative audiences in theatres rather than churches. In Personal Mark he writes about the life of Jesus, as seen through his own ...”

“... he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that were blamed for – and that Hobsbawm later blamed ...”

“... Morison’s black suits and Corbusier’s bow tie), Lutyens wore, as his daughter remembers, brown suits, brown shoes, duck-egg green shirts with high starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had black walls (semi-gloss), white ceilings and woodwork, green painted floors and yellow ...”

“... and Schröder were the major figures involved, their rivalry sometimes echoing that of Blair and Brown in the British Labour Party. Both had set their sights on being the Party’s candidate for Chancellor in 1998, a position that does not fall automatically to the Party leader but is contested in its own right. Lafontaine was, above all, the party ...”

“... the lot: banners, slogans, posters, cards, photographs of deformed babies, cartoons of Blair, Brown and Bush, the parliamentary voting records of MPs, grubby teddy bears and toys (as well as the plastic sheets and cans that constituted Haw’s accommodation). They acted under Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act: a rather heavy legal ...”

“... palms – is supplied with blue and white sunbeds on which sunbathers lie, burnt to shades of brown as dark and various as samples of woodstain.I am told that Rome in the Shade, an early guidebook I have, alas, never seen, directs visitors who are unwilling to retreat during the heat of the day to routes which keep to the shady side of the ...”

“... Elliott published a study of the latter palace in partnership with the art historian Jonathan Brown, reconstructing its appearance from literary sources (since the palace itself was destroyed by the British during the Peninsular War), and paying particular attention to the programme of the paintings by Velazquez, Zurbaran and others in the throne ...”

“... in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the ...”

“...                               One woman Makes the rest look down. Wallace Stevens I’ve never much liked Tsvetaeva. A churlish way to begin: I do so simply because I think that, in not liking her very much, I am at one not only with much of her posterity but with almost all her contemporaries. On the way to hazarding some unpopular views, it is not bad to begin with one that is, if unacknowledged, widespread ...”

“... ministers leaving Parliament after a short interval (hours for Blair, five years for Major and Brown, with Cameron likely to follow suit) and party leaders quickly throwing in the towel after election defeats (Hague, Miliband, Clegg). The most recent generation of political leaders attained high office infinitely faster than their predecessors, serving no ...”

“... McAllister’s Captain’s Log (‘with Graham Clark’) and Blue Grit by Glasgow Rangers’ John Brown (‘with Peter Watson’). Would Brown reveal some juicy Gazza tales or give us the dirt on Graeme Souness? Not a chance. Gascoigne is not mentioned (perhaps he arrived too late) and as ...”

“... colour is sombre: Avril’s coat is dark blue-green, the night-time background blue, purple and brown. The apple green of her hat and its white flowers, her red hair, the chalky pallor of her long, thin face and her red, pursed lips are brightly theatrical, but her expression is contained, the gesture of hands clasped at her waist is ladylike. Unlike La ...”

“... lips and red vaginas in the nudes are as far away as you can get from the hundred shades of grey, brown and green with which English watercolourists caught this island ...”

“... for instance – are in two. The text, written in Greek capitals without word breaks, is in brown ink with some words and lines in red. The Sinaiticus, very plain and very grand, and a manuscript in the Vatican of about the same date share the distinction of being the earliest extant manuscripts of the Christian Bible: that is, of the Greek text of the ...”

“... He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been ...”