“... one who spent extended periods of time in his company could stand him: ‘a complete cunt’, as Andrew Strauss let slip in the commentary box this summer. That, incidentally, was a word that tended to attach itself to Rudd as well. Accused of describing Rudd in those terms, the former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer replied: ‘I don’t use ...”

“... McAllister’s Captain’s Log (‘with Graham Clark’) and Blue Grit by Glasgow Rangers’ John Brown (‘with Peter Watson’). Would Brown reveal some juicy Gazza tales or give us the dirt on Graeme Souness? Not a chance. Gascoigne is not mentioned (perhaps he arrived too late) and as for Souness: ‘I haven’t got a ...”

“... disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what ...”

“... was said to be very popular, along with ‘Mean Tweets 2024’.‘It’s got this beautiful soft brown cover on it,’ a woman said of the Trump-endorsed Bible she got for $75 plus tax. ‘I love it,’ she added. ‘It shows how much our future president is leaning into his faith.’I spotted a man who was selling The Collected Poems of Donald ...”

“... home, I thought. ‘Estimate: $4000-6000.’ And further along a hand-knitted cardigan, ‘with a brown geometric pattern and matching knitted belt. Worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and featured in a series of photographs by George Barris taken on the beach in Santa Monica, California. Estimate: $30,000-50,000.’ In the corner of the window there stood a ...”

“... for publicity. He chaired the organisation for just a year before being succeeded by H. Rap Brown, a reckless provocateur. In 1968, Carmichael himself was expelled. By the early 1970s, SNCC had disappeared.After Lewis left SNCC, he worked for various philanthropic and social justice organisations, and between 1970 and 1977 directed the Voter Education ...”

“... the prints are grouped by the authors of the paintings on which they are based, the room – and Andrew Wilton’s excellent essay on this aspect of the show – invites us to focus on the printmakers, especially the French Protestant immigrant François Vivares, and the brilliant William Woollett, who became the finest, the most intricate and industrious ...”

“... in triumph like the train-ferry when it puts in’; blue wind-flowers that ‘shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses’; or ‘It’s spring 1827. Beethoven/hoists his death mask and sails off.’ Unusually, and attractively too, his poems don’t eclipse or exhaust their subjects, but leave ...”

“... drawings and paintings – a good Warburgian, perhaps. In his drawings on canvas using the reddish-brown pigment known as caput mortuum, Kitaj comes closest to Walter Sickert as a painter of photographs. His images of baseball players, including Stanky and Berra at St Petersburg, from 1967, on show at Piano Nobile, are the equivalents of the music hall ...”

“... despite seeing so much? The controversy and protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 exposed the lack of official data on police killings. Two newspapers launched investigations. The Fatal Force, a database maintained by the Washington Post, records ‘every fatal shooting by a police ...”

“... billion up front helped Labour operate within the fiscal strictures set down by Gordon Brown in his ‘golden rules’: spending must be balanced by taxes over the economic cycle and the government should borrow only to invest. This immediate benefit of the loan sale was seen to outweigh future losses. Recently the coalition government sold the ...”

“... yes: fork-bending no. The question is not this simple, however. In the books by Dr Finucane, by Andrew Mackenzie and by Susan Blackmore, there are countless contemporary experiences of ‘psychic’ phenomena. They are all very carefully classified: out-of-the-body experiences, psychokinesis (the ability to move objects without physical contact or any known ...”

“... A counter-radicalism of marketolatry soon relegated the older versions to museums or sects. As Andrew Bacevich points out in The New American Militarism,1 ‘radical’ came to mean Trotskyite mince reprocessed into neo-conservative sausages. Situationist-style disreputables refused old and new rules alike, naturally; but such dissent served mainly to ...”

“... America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had urgent ...”

“... next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the ...”