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“... the avant-garde. As a heavyweight boxer, his career peaked in 1916, when he fought the formidable Jack Johnson in Barcelona. He lasted six rounds. These two strands of Cravan’s career are not as diverse as one might think: his stance as a writer was extremely combative – confrontation and ‘anti-art’ polemic were his métier. As the poet Mina Loy, who ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”

“... a birthday cake. The man nods; his face, which is yellow and narrow, makes a narrow smile. Small brown hair, like feathers, springs from his brow. Like my mother, he smiles without showing his teeth. He smiles in a minimal way, as a social obligation: turning up the corners of his mouth. He nods; he acknowledges me. We are home at Bankbottom, in my ...”

“... this small sable completed a generally lugubrious expression which started with his melancholy brown eyes ... That’s a fair example of the capsule physical description with which Kerr introduces each new character. It’s elaborately constructed to stamp itself on the reader’s vision, and is completely ignored. You form your own picture from little ...”

“... larger unit of the fledgling ANA. Sitting around a wooden table, Mac, Shadders, Dave Wilkinson and Jack Mizon described how much of an ask that is. They started politely and diplomatically by describing the ANA as ‘below average’ but were encouraged by the general laughter to give me the whole story. By the time they had finished I had an image of the ANA ...”

“... leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore surrounding Cook’s first years in office, including the arms to Sierra Leone affair, diplomatic gaffes in India and Israel, and the embarrassingly public break-up of his marriage, Kampfner’s study is unduly ...”

“... in by this nonsense and then parroted it back to us. The numbers question was investigated by Jack Brown, an American writer who has lived in Cairo for several years and who on 11 July published a detailed article in Maghreb émergent, an indispensable source of serious coverage of North African developments, republished in English on the website ...”

“... Here lives, besides Annie Connor, her daughter Maggie, who is my godmother and a widow, who has a brown raincoat and a checked woollen scarf. She does errands for people and is at their beck and call. Here lives Beryl, Maggie’s daughter, my heroine: a schoolgirl, dimpled and saucy. There is only one doll for which I ever care, and that one, in tribute to ...”

“... as Sally Mann). He assembled poems about married love, alongside his partner (and colleague at Brown) the poet C.D. Wright. He delved further into geology, especially in the aptly titled Science & Steepleflower (1998). In 2008 he published As a Friend (2008), a novel or a roman à clef, linked to Wright’s early life. He also fashioned an astonishing ...”

“... a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away ...”

“... not forgetting the manager, even, without whom there would he no gigs, hotel rooms or backstage Jack Daniels on the contract rider. And then there is the bass-player. The bassist is the other man in the band. This is the guy who is only the other half of the rhythm section: the one who only backs up the drummer: who keeps the beat without setting it: whose ...”

“... the beautiful Phoebe McGrath, who just happens to be picnicking there with her parents, Molly and Jack. Book One of Illywhacker tells of how Herbert develops this encounter into a flourishing epoch of his life, seducing Phoebe, deluding Jack and almost upsetting the delicate balance of Molly McGrath’s mind. Phoebe and ...”

“... shit-covered insects swarm the vehicle. He has found what he was looking for. It is Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It is 1954 in Los Angeles. With Harold Land on tenor and Bud’s younger brother Richie Powell playing piano, George Morrow on bass, they are playing ‘Daahoud’, and playing it as well as it can possibly be played. The Maestro takes a deep ...”

“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... described and include some good minor characters. Oakes worked on the Army newspaper, the Union Jack, edited by a Major Tarrant who had such a deep reverence for royalty that any king or queen mentioned in its pages had to be given the prefix HM. Defending this typographical clumsiness, Tarrant declared: ‘The world may be going to the bow-wows, but as ...”