“... 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a ...”

“... well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying down barrels of Sauerkraut, cutting ...”

“... by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both the status of the FBI and the date, 22 July 1934, by getting himself shot to pieces emerging from the Biograph in Chicago, after watching Clark Gable play an amiable gangster in Manhattan Melodrama. While trying to ignore my ...”

“... It is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable ...”

“... once blisteringly white and standing for all that was new in architecture and living, was painted brown to elude the Luftwaffe. The moment had passed. But in the year of the hole, Hepworth and Nicholson (who hadn’t quite left Winifred, though he would divorce her in 1938) lived in Belsize Park, at No. 7 Mall Studios, a row of artists’ living and working ...”

“... the St James, the Virgin may have suffered from too much attention on the part of curators. The brown stain which is especially marked in Christ’s flesh is not natural to the Carrara marble of which it was carved. Boucher speculates that it may be due to wax polish which has darkened but the phenomenon occurs in many Renaissance marbles in museums, and ...”

“... I was waiting there for my guide, the poet and essayist Adolfo Barberá. This man, with his alert brown eyes and glinting spectacles, had firm plans for my visit to what he called ‘the capital of accurate dreaming’. He would walk with me to Waterloo. Sebald had written about this excursion in The Rings of Saturn: ‘The very definition of Belgian ...”

“... with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His ...”

“... six members of the Supreme Court – all the justices save Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fact that John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are all Catholic may speak to the idea of diversity and variety within the Church, but it also ...”

“... hero and demonic waters: I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable ... Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. (Eliot was of course referring to the Mississippi, and he used similar phrases in an essay on Huckleberry Finn.) The second ...”

“... in delight. As the water rises up his legs he echoes, “Yarr ... Yarr ... Yarr ... Yarr.” The brown obliterating depths rush to welcome him. Yarr yarr yarr ...’ Yarr: it’s the name for a kind of destructive collusiveness, a sort of communal nay-saying, that waft of evil you catch sometimes when people, men mostly, sit up drinking late and someone ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... of economics didn’t cease with the arrival of Clinton and Blair, though it changed form. Gordon Brown has been a particularly important channel. His decision to delegate to the Bank of England the power to set interest rates – arguably the single most crucial and most successful decision Labour has made – was underpinned by academic work applying game ...”

“... leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to have been killed by Maoists in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry ...”