“... 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 ...”

“... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...”

“... in Rome. Dickens recognised the artist’s models loitering on the Spanish Steps: ‘The man in a brown cloak, who leans against a wall, with his arms folded in his mantle, and looks out of the corners of his eyes: which are just visible beneath his broad slouched hat. This is the assassin model.’ In August 1845, soon after his return to London, Dickens was ...”

“... tall gaunt hatless youth’ with ‘prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead’ – and Mrs Hopewell invites him to dinner. Joy (who in order to wind up her mother has changed her legal name to Hulga) decides to seduce him, but when they go up to the hayloft together, he steals her wooden ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and ...”