“... 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 ...”

“... Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a successor to ...”

“... better than anyone the new rules of political fabrication. He comprehensively outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown in Manchester by being truer both to himself and to the spirit of contemporary politics in the way he stretched the truth. Blair was sincere in the lies he told. Brown, by contrast, came across as a straightforward ...”

“... this route. Closed to the north by the east transept of the cathedral and to the south by the brown brick wall of the museum, it is the closest thing we are ever likely to have to the streets radiating from the Cathedral and the Exchange that would have shaped London had proposals made for London after the Great Fire been realised. But the site brought ...”

“... of island lives that are as troubled as any. Gauguin maids, the solemn, solid, bare-breasted, brown girls surrounded by flowers, fruit, trees and the sea, may have entered the popular imagination as images of blissful indolence but a closer look tells you that the pictures are sad. (In a letter to his wife, Mette, he once described the ‘harmony’ of ...”

“... and in the objects (shoe, bottle, bread, apple, fork); red, blue, pink, green, yellow and brown merge iridescently like puddles of oil on black tarmac. The combination of rainbow colours and encroaching blackness, makes it, like much of Miró’s work, both pretty and sinister. ‘Despite the fact that while working on the painting I was thinking only ...”

“... at the turn of the 16th century, drove the stream of invention into furious eddies. Beverly Louise Brown, who edited the catalogue – seven of the 11 contributors are women: it seems proper that the critical eye cast on what is on the whole male peacocking should be female – cites a description of the atmosphere in Rome around 1604 from Karel van Mander’s ...”

“... here (it was made for an exhibition not a client), is on the face of it no more than a doodle in brown ink and coloured crayon. But its sprightliness sums up the spirit which, in finished buildings, so undermined their seriousness that Gehry, along with a few others, was able to do what no one had done since 18th-century gardeners threw in the odd grotto and ...”

“... is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap). Thick paint – in early pictures so thick that it seems to parody all its Expressionist precursors – and wide strokes add weight to the ...”

“... from ‘The Steppe’ to illustrate the point: ‘The hills had vanished and wherever you looked a brown, cheerless plain stretched away endlessly . . . Between the cottages and beyond the church a blue river was visible and beyond it the hazy distance . . . The sheer scale of it bewildered Yegorushka and conjured up thoughts of the world of legend . . . Who ...”

“... Sunlight as you drive up the A41. The first (a blue one) sends you to the factory, the second (a brown one, indicating a cultural monument) sends you to the village and the art gallery. If all British manufacturing disappeared the map would still bear the name of a bar of soap.It was not making the stuff but the idea of packaging it under the name ...”

“... was six but I thought I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned out of the ...”

“... is in someone’s long lens and for whom blood is everything: the Windsors, aka the Firm. Tina Brown, a smart ethnographer bearing a scalpel, engages with this dispiriting bunch as though they, like the Rooneys of that photograph, have yet to evolve.The slice of world that is vouchsafed to the queen and her many dependants, to whom she doles out annual ...”

“... The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from some of the ...”

“... natural transcriptive technique did not need to. It is the darkness, the ascendancy of grey, brown and black that strikes you first. Light in general offers up the world for inspection in a range of luminosities – from eye-searing sunlight to faintest moonlight. The Impressionists showed that you could drop the dark end of the range and increase the ...”