“... 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 ...”

“... moulded bricks of the kind Palladio’s columns were built with. But it is in the many drawings in brown ink that you can see how hard Palladio worked at playing the game of architecture and determining its rules. Most of them are now in the RIBA library: they were brought to England by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s and then passed through various hands, in ...”

“... seems to be frowning), some look much older. In 049 her dark hair has been made blonde and her brown eyes blue. In this version there is much of the starlet and little of the saint about her. The variations put you in the presence of a crowd – that of the makers. It may be that Henner’s image was chosen as a source because the face fitted some common ...”

“... church, a few landscapes. The colour is soft: in the watercolours often made softer by the buff or brown of the paper. The later oil paintings use a range quite close to that of Morandi’s still lifes. All the pictures began as records of things seen, even those of the backs of nuns in church, which appear simple enough to have been painted from memory. (Gwen ...”

“... studies close in appearance to Constable sketches. Sometimes the canvas is primed, sometimes bare brown linen shows through. His life’s work reads as a calculated attempt to avoid a style which would have a life of its own, and you finish up not knowing who, as a painter, he is.There are some early photographs in the catalogue of Andrews with Soho friends ...”

“... from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with the headline ‘Brown Saves ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... as minister without portfolio in 1984, but the Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made much more use of the practice of outside appointments, with Brown appointing Peter Mandelson in 2008 as secretary of state for business and then in 2009 as ‘first secretary of ...”

“... power in Whitehall during the six years of the first Wilson Government acquired a fund of George Brown stories. The fact that many were so preposterous as to be incredible did not mean that they were untrue. Even when they redounded to Brown’s credit, which they occasionally did, it was quite possible that they were ...”

“... Geological maps, marbled with the laminar streaks of sedimentary rocks in yellow, green and brown and sprinkled with the great red plums of granite, have always been strident. There are none of those here, but there are examples of topographical maps overpainted with emphatic information of other sorts. In one, Second World War bomb damage is recorded ...”

“... covers. A sad, thoughtfully dithering photo of the prime minister fronts What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? The cover of Christopher Harvie’s book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... high-waisted Empire styles of the Roman portraits to Mme Marcotte’s rather horrid, mid-century, brown dress, from styles which cover bodies to styles which shape them. His profligacy with information helps to explain the inordinate length of time some pictures took to complete – Mme Moitessier was 12 years under the brush. There is more there to be seen ...”

“... the civil service after the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death, but returned when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.) Cameron appointed Greensill, who had left Citigroup to start his own firm, as an adviser. He was given a desk in the Cabinet Office and a secure Number Ten email address. In 2014, he was made a UK crown representative and ...”

“... paintings … No one nowadays is skilful or laborious enough to forge a Meissonier or a Ford Madox Brown that would deceive even a professional expert.’ He was wrong about the skill: look at the Giunti Botticelli, which could have been on the easel when he wrote. But slight sketches, if you can get into your painter’s way of making marks, and have a ...”