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“... occasion, I tried 42 versions, but the final effect was too lapidary – you know what I mean, Jack? What the hell are you trying to extort – my trade secrets?’ As everyone knows, being a funny man is no laughing matter: our most popular clowns seem almost expected to have a savage, twisted underside to their natures. Perelman, who lived entirely off ...”

“... Kureishi, Farook Dhondy’s patronage at Channel 4, Praful Mohanti’s Through Brown Eyes). But in newspapers and non-fiction books ‘black’ Britons continue to emerge as one-dimensional categories which have to be worried about, feared or assisted – rioters, newsagents, voters, victims – rather than the rich collection of ...”

“... myself to do’. He also recorded another surprise: ‘we made Mingo, Sir W. Batten’s black, and Jack, Sir W. Penn’s, dance, and it was strange how the first did dance with a great deal of seeming skill.’ Mingo and Jack lived very close to Pepys. They worked for his colleagues, accompanied them everywhere, ran errands ...”

“... across stream, a green infanta hawthorn in a clearing; another dwarfed and crazy as a green Jack Frost, insect thin trees, lion mane one whose lower branches show hands sunlit from windows. As many shapes as among shifting clouds: fists and sparklers and fingers and fleurs de lys and candles and fans and umbrella spokes and florid gestures and ...”

“... angle of a leg, or the loop of a skipping rope add movement. English painters like John Bratby and Jack Smith were drawing on similar subjects with a not dissimilar, calculated clumsiness that trades crispness for directness, as though seeking to match the thing drawn in the accent of the drawing. ‘Catterline in Winter’, c.1963. Her seascapes and ...”

“... of stained glass above the front door lets in some light, but it’s quickly absorbed by the brown-painted wood on the walls. Step into the drawing room, however, and you’re suddenly, implausibly surrounded by decoration and colour. Pale green stalks, leaves, tulip buds and flowers are intertwined on the walls and there’s a narrow frieze just below ...”

“... séance, a memory stunt summoning all the ghosts of his long career, his busy life. The writer Jack Trevor Story is presented as a moral touchstone, the exemplar of a better period – jazz, film-scripts, novels sold three times over under different titles; the third wife, the fifth bankruptcy. These sidebars have sidebars, addenda foliate in Mandelbrotian ...”

“... when pork was the capital source of meat for the population. The half-wild, coarse-bristled, dark brown, prick-eared animal of medieval illuminated calendars foraged in the woods that surrounded the outlying pastures of many villages. In autumn and winter, they were driven out by swineherds to fatten on beech mast and acorns: a practice, beset with folklore ...”

“... McIntosh as Labour leader in the GLC. McIntosh and Livingstone liked each other about as much as Brown and Blair, but McIntosh knew of Livingstone’s problems and one day, in Livingstone’s words, he ‘kindly asked how I was coping, but as politics has to be a ruthless business and I was planning to replace him I didn’t want to get any closer to him and ...”

“... a study of the subject, though there is Barbara Trapido’s novel Brother of the More Famous Jack, and it’s one of the themes of John Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. Among the many irritations must be to find yourself always referred to as so-and-so’s brother or sister, and to be written about as such by smart-arses. Ali G, despite ...”

“... counter separating a sink and a miniature electric cooker from the living area. Lay picked up a brown bottle from the counter, held it up to the window for a moment and unscrewed the lid. ‘Lemora,’ he said. ‘Frank’s favourite tipple. Though actually I think half the reason he liked it was because everyone else hated it.’ He poured two fingers of ...”

“... my own wife and motorbike. I’m wearing my old school scarf that I thought was lost forever. Brown and magenta quarters, the smartest colours in the world. It was round my neck all the time. Williams’s privileged background is mined differently in the impressive prose poem about his mother, ‘Margaret Vyner’, where names of perfumes mix with family ...”

“... trust: after Wilson unsuccessfully contested the deputy leadership with the Gaitskellite George Brown at the end of 1962, Gaitskell told a journalist that although both were prone to disloyalty, he preferred Brown’s drunken indiscretions to Wilson’s more sober calculations. Gaitskell died of lupus in January ...”