“... repertoire. Brindle’s panoramic view gives full credit to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, too often shunted into a siding marked ‘garden history’, as ‘a phenomenon’ and ‘one of the defining figures of Georgian England’, whose effect on landed estates was to make them more practical and economical, as well as more attractive.The ...”

“... be, if you were anything other than alone.’ Quoting his lines in a letter to his painter friend Roger Hilton, Graham added, typically: ‘OK OK a bit overblown speech, but it is approximately true, if I can say that.’He began to try, in the poems he wrote in the 1940s, to make the difficulty of communication the whole point, transmuting his defensive ...”

“... by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have ...”

“... took his likeness: ‘height, 6’1”; slim build; eyes blue; pale complexion; hair light brown; long oval face; large nose and ears; thick lips’. This description was added to Hobsbawm’s Personal File 211,764, which was now running to its sixth volume. It’s not that MI5’s box of tricks didn’t run to a camera, but with an estimated 250,000 ...”

“... apart from – the painting’s three great horizontal bands: the grey of the sky, the yellow and brown of the fields, the scuffed green and brown of the foreground. The clump of trees, to adopt the jargon of landscape painting, is a contrejour. It functions as a kind of anchor: a darkness against which a more distant light ...”

“... like Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple; Keith’s character, like that of Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley, was there to inform us of the harmlessness and ineffectuality of a defunct class represented by this posthumously lively personality. Helen Mirren’s portrayal of a female police chief in Prime Suspect was a new departure on British television ...”

“... Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing as Associated with It, a primer published in 1910, the year Roger Fry organised the first London exhibition of Post-Impressionism. Solomon’s mistrust of ‘modernity’ and the ‘overstrange’ would be carried over into the practice of camouflage, where such gestures were all too likely, as he saw it, to prove ...”

“... and their cubs and regretted having to stop reading when her therapist called her into his room. Roger MacKinnon, who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion ...”

“... to feel for the New Labour ‘Project’ in the 1990s. For a while, it had seemed as if Blair and Brown were contemplating a Charter 88-style programme of constitutional reform, incorporating PR and an alliance with the Liberal Democrats, as well as radical measures of Lords reform and devolved government. As it has turned out, however, Blairism is ‘Hormone ...”

“... Sean Crampton had lost a leg (his prosthetic replacement, which was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict ...”

“... walking into the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the US Capitol still pass a bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that black people could not be American citizens since they had always been ‘regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race ...”

“... traditional practice – very dusty, it is beginning to seem, as old ‘as history herself’, Roger Aubenas suggested in 1960, and very probably somewhat older than that. Some of the problems that could arise with Bray’s ‘brothers’ had already been revealed by the publication in 1994 of Pierre Chaplais’s studies on Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s ...”

“... chain of command. In Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture and the Weaponised Gaze (2018), Roger Stahl writes thatAt a certain point, perhaps through sheer force of numbers, the view through the weapon itself earned a primary place in the presentation of war in the post-industrial West. These images, after all, wielded the ultimate strategic advantage ...”

“... with editorials, articles, broadcasts, appeals explaining to the French that they faced the brown peril and must now rally as one to Chirac, if the Republic was to be saved. Youth demonstrated in the streets, the official left rushed to the side of the president, even much of the far left decided it was the moment of no pasarán, and they too must ...”