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“... but far more important in the advancement of botany was the encouragement Banks gave to Robert Brown, whose unillustrated flora of Australia and Tasmania can, according to Bengt Jonsell in Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery and the Museum in the 18th Century,† be ‘justly regarded as the birthplace of global taxonomy in botany’, its ...”

“... to the detail of mossy roofs, leaves and branches is wonderful. There are pen and wash drawings on brown paper which bring to mind Ruskin’s Alpine landscapes. Ruskin praised him only once, but handsomely, in the 1846 edition of the first volume of Modern Painters, where he wrote that Palmer’s ‘studies of foreign foliage especially are beyond all praise ...”

“... Dennis Brown concludes his celebration of Anglo-American Modernism with an account of Ezra Pound’s death on 30 October 1972. ‘That year I ended an obituary of Pound in a Canadian student newspaper: Pound is now dead and no poet remains of his stature. But poetry is “NEWS that stays NEWS”. READ him: Read HIM ...”

“... an undeflectable fascination. This is as true of Cavafy in Alexandria as it is of George Mackay Brown in Orkney. Born in the Orcadian harbour town of Stromness in 1921, Brown was the youngest of six children. His father was a local postman, his mother an incomer from mainland Scotland. He came to be associated with the ...”

“... and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s talent for noticing the deceptiveness of the taken-for-granted in his defences of Christian belief in a secular world. Some people began to wonder if there were something saintly about him.After his death in ...”

“... the captain. The football idiom here is not just a metaphor: it’s more serious than that. When Peter Stothard was allowed to follow Blair for the month that saw the Iraq war begin, he quickly had to learn the argot, as his revealing book recounts.* Campbell duly makes his dig against Jack Straw, who is the MP for Blackburn: ‘What do Saddam Hussein and ...”

“... the Outer Limits, is more hooked into the media than is Coyote, and more conventionally slick. Peter Richardson and Nigel Planer have been together now for eight years – ‘We do everything together. We piss into each other’s mouths’ – but for most of that time they played music, with the jokes as decoration. Now a lot of the jokes (many of them ...”

“... ultimately be judged and defined by what he does.’ A journalist who may be closer to events, Peter Snowdon ends his book on a more equivocal note: ‘If the last four and a half years have been testing for Cameron’s Conservative Party,’ he writes, ‘the next few will be far harder, whether the party wins or loses.’ Not that Snowdon is in any doubt ...”

“... nature of highlights, grasping the fact, for example, that the end of a nose or a cheek, even a brown or black nose or cheek, will often be the brightest part of the face – brighter than the ‘white’ of the eye, which is, in fact, usually grey and shadowed by the eye socket – is one step on the path leading from naive to ...”

“... president of the National Union of Students; political adviser to Barbara Castle and then Peter Shore (there are shrewd portraits of both); local government (he was elected to the old Inner London Education Authority and became its deputy leader); Labour candidate, first in a hopeless seat, then the safe Labour seat of Blackburn, which he inherited ...”

“... Guardian covered the recent Budget, it had a lot of fun unpacking the surprises sprung by Gordon Brown in the course of his demonstration that ‘all this prudence is for a purpose.’ The point was that his ‘updated Protestant work ethic’ offered rewards both for individuals and for the nation as a whole, in the form of tax cuts and increases in public ...”

“... The trouble is, Millais’s judgment, in whatever spirit it was made, has been that of posterity. Peter Funnell’s essay in the catalogue of the exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery quotes Arthur Symons, writing in 1896, a few months after Millais’s death: ‘a finer promise than any artist of his time’ was wasted. His later pictures were done ...”

“... on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same ...”

“... of taste seem an absurd condescension. Even Pop Art was still fine art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of ...”

“... hate to publish sloppy writing if it can be improved,’ he says, brooding on a TS of Peter Fleming’s. His editor’s fingers itch, a symptom both creditable and, in certain circumstances, dangerous. His own laborious edition of Oscar Wilde’s letters reaches its final or perhaps one should say penultimate stage in Volume VI; the references to ...”