“... the nearly blank expressions, the eloquent intervals, the airy combination of dusty pink, chestnut brown, pale blue and white: all mark this painting as the earliest and perhaps the most interesting example of Piero’s influence on a great modern artist. In Young Spartans, which belongs to the same years and is now in the National Gallery, the group of elders ...”

“... and to let people visit her quarters. The President’s House is a mile north-east of the former Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital, which closed in 1973. Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century, and his image – along with his speeches and bestselling autobiography – made him an example of Black progress in an era when former ...”

“... thrown off the project, which was eventually built to a design by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Whatever its programmatic ‘complexity and contradiction’, as Venturi would put it, the Sainsbury Wing ‘looked’ to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither ...”

“... the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples: Lutyens made them ...”

“... the machinations of his enemies. Brivati’s previous books include The End of Decline: Blair and Brown in Power, as well as biographies of the Labour Party eminences Lord Goodman and Hugh Gaitskell. He met Naqvi’s family just after his arrest in London. The pivot of the book is Abraaj’s planned sale of Karachi Electric to a Chinese company, which Brivati ...”

“... of these is the fault of father-figures who induce shame and resentment. For the former slave Frederick Douglass, about whom and Harriet Beecher Stowe he writes his best criticism, the father is obviously White Master, though there is also White Mistress, in whose capacity to read and write, and in her willingness to teach them both to a young ...”

“... went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small Scottish ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... McIntosh as Labour leader in the GLC. McIntosh and Livingstone liked each other about as much as Brown and Blair, but McIntosh knew of Livingstone’s problems and one day, in Livingstone’s words, he ‘kindly asked how I was coping, but as politics has to be a ruthless business and I was planning to replace him I didn’t want to get any closer to him and ...”

“... was Nazi Germany. Not long ago, the American Historical Review published an article by Kate Brown – which Pipes surely disliked, if he read it – with the arresting subtitle ‘Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place’. In the old days, it was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that were ‘nearly the same place’, and the underpinning ...”

“... development, Burns cuts himself off from musicians of colour, such as Priscilla Renea and Kane Brown, who have worked to upend the stock narratives (and have spoken, in public, about the persistence of racism within the country music establishment). Never mind Lil Nas X – whom Burns kept referring to as ‘the black gay rapper Little Nas X’ at the 92nd ...”

“... recalled. ‘Her dress was a compromise between that of a man and a woman; she wore her hair in a brown, curly crop, and she rode on horseback astride, to the horror of all kirk-going folk.’ In London, Bonheur happily received the attentions of Eastlake and Landseer, though the English weather and the snooping English press (‘the Inquisition’) were less ...”

“... suggested as the presiding influences or guides to the volume. In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Lowell suggests that his true competitors are the likes of Salinger and Bellow. ‘The ideal modern form,’ he even says, ‘seems to be the novel and certain short stories.’ Working from prose, and a compatibility with prose – the copious ...”

“... simply stamped out; with the Pre-Raphaelites, there was indeed such a potential – he cited Madox Brown’s house, where ‘there were not only artists but also atheists, political refugees, vagrants: there was the kind of widening which was questioning the order of a much wider area’ – and this did link to Morris’s development. But Williams could not ...”

“... side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.’ Pincher describes the comparison as ‘my most cherished ...”