“... Absalom; the enemy of Saul, the king he was prophesied to replace; the devoted friend of Jonathan; and the adulterous and murderous lover of the alluring Bathsheba. Medieval artists, urged on by hugely wealthy and sometimes spendthrift patrons, created remarkable vignettes of these scenes. The exhibition showed leaves from the Crusader Bible, the ...”

“... does the FBI keep files on? Is there a filing cabinet in Washington that contains a rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce Carol Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of ...”

“... just need to have the money, the equivalent of three dollars for a dose of ‘Mexican Mud’, a brown, poorly refined paste that quickly clogs needles and veins. People shoot up everywhere, in the picaderos – squats run by drug dealers, where entry is five pesos – and in houses, often with family. Pancho is a 26-year-old who when he isn’t too wasted ...”

“... socks, windows, the car, the looall downstream from each other. Whenthat final basinful of brown scumwas scattered over the garden plants,you could see water in his own eyesaching to join it ...The only problem with this engaging portrait is why it needed to be a poem at all. It’s the beginning of an okay prose short story whose lines stop short of ...”

“... of New York’s art establishment a few weeks ago: ‘what if we had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers, Philip Tate?’ The question is left hanging but the answer, in Tate’s case, is that this little practical joke would surely have gone out into the world without its best gag. Had the guests at ...”

“... in oils, an Annunciation triptych commissioned in 1860 for an altar in Brighton, glows sombrely, brown and black, with a spilling of gilt sky and reddish-gold haloes for the Holy Family (Mary is Jane Morris), so that you can forgive the way the third king’s feet stretch out like empty socks. Burne-Jones’s fascination with dangerous women bore fruit in ...”

“... none the less patronisingly dismissed Jane Austen as ‘knowing no more of her process than the brown bird that sings on the orchard bough’, he forgot or ignored the fact that a highly skilled and instinctive artist may know very little about how his task came to be chosen, but a very great deal about how it was done. The process and impulse in these ...”

“... the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China. Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History (2023) studied plagues and their effects from the Stone Age to the present: it was a plague pandemic around 3000 BCE that cleared the way for the incursion into Europe of the Western Steppe ...”

“... to draw deeper meaning. Zink reportedly wrote The Wallcreeper in three weeks, for the amusement of Jonathan Franzen, with whom she had struck up a strange, happy email correspondence after writing to him to recommend the work of a German ornithologist. It soon emerged that she had been writing for years, so she sent him Sailing towards the Sunset by Avner ...”

“... around 1770, when Gainsborough was living in Bath. For many years, the sitter was identified as Jonathan Buttall, the son of a London ironmonger who owned the painting until the mid-1790s. But more recent evidence suggests it may be a portrait of Gainsborough’s nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who lived with him and worked as his assistant.The dimensions are ...”

“... the mission of the bloodmobile, the charts devised in Hartford, poplin suits in summertime, brown bread with baked beans, little oyster crackers (with chowder, not with oysters), baseball, tennis, the New Yorker, travel hats he purchased from the back of the New Yorker (which he sometimes wore to baseball games), the pleasures of night skiing with his ...”

“... we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means ...”

“... houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost ...”

“... for the journey. I had read Chesterton on Dickens and on the Victorian age; read all the Father Brown stories; and read or heard quoted many memorable epigrams. I had seen shadows of his invention in Borges, snatches of his thought in T.S. Eliot, echoes of his paradoxes in Larkin, and an allusion to his imagery in Nabokov (I’m thinking of the ‘democracy ...”

“... client-systems through kinship networks and practised the politics of the bustarella, the little brown envelope filled with cash. 1983 saw this system of patronage and protection crumble. The greatest losses suffered by the Christian Democrats were in Palermo and Naples – to paraphrase Croce’s remarks, the only oriental cities without European ...”