"Westerners have a history of undervaluing all things blue... For the Romans, in particular, blue was associated with barbarism: writers from the period mention that Celtic soldiers dyed their bodies blue, and Pliny accused women of doing the same before participating in orgies." - Kassia St Clair, The Secret Life of Colour
"In 1957, artist Yves Klein debuted a series of paintings in Milan. Each featured the same intense, ultramarine shade, a colour he described as 'a blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification.' International Klein Blue as Klein called it, was created by suspending pure pigment in synthetic resin, a process he later patented , and which ensured the dye retained its brilliance on canvas. For Klein, IK Blue represented a sense of boundlessness and pure space; and he worked almost exclusively in the colour until his death in 1961." Create Review, July 2014
"She told me...she carries a blue stone with her into church , and kisses it - that she can only wear blue because other colours scorch her skin... Is she ill? She was always a little silly I suppose but cleverly so - it was as if she'd chosen to be silly because it's a characteristic so often expected of women that it's almost admired." The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry
"Stella Ransome lay on a white couch between two open windows hung with blue curtains. She wore a dark brown dressing gown and blue slippers and was decked with turquoise beads. On her hands were gimcrack rings, and on every windowsill blue glass bottles glinted: there were sherry bottles and poison bottles and little flagons for scent, shards of glass gathered from gutters and opaque nuggets tossed up by the tide. Neatly laid out on tables and chairs were items ordered by depth or pallor of pigment; bottle-tops and buttons, silk scraps and folded sheets of paper, feathers and stones, and all of them blue." The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry
