“... long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an extension of the Hegelian doctrine that the owl of Minerva takes her flight only when the shades of night ...”

“... also what is billed in the programme as a ‘Special Guest’. This turns out to be Gordon Brown, who makes a decent speech too and one which, as R. says, must be impromptu as he repeats himself. Flattered to be gathered up by Neil and taken in past the explanatory displays (‘You don’t want all this foreplay, do you?’) to the figures ...”

“... Jesse Florian in Farewell, My Lovely, who ‘had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blonde, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely ...”

“... the Continent. Le Brun’s image of Karoline was considered risqué because, beneath her reddish-brown gown, her feet are bare. In her engagingly conversational memoir, Souvenirs, Le Brun records that the princess’s husband responded to complaints from his scandalised grandparents by placing a pair of elegant shoes under the frame and explaining they had ...”

“... authorship had been forgotten. After this project she collaborated with her childhood friend Anne Dixon on cyanotype impressions of ferns, lace and feathers. A lush recent book edited by Peter Walther and produced by Benedikt Taschen offers an overview of Atkins’s work, illustrated not only with facsimiles of every cyanotype but also with photographs ...”

“... in the Mill on the Floss (Chap. VIII) “Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.”’ Another is treated with more formality – ‘Thank you again, dear Professor Adorno, for your friendship and for your belief in my work’ – and mocked gently behind his ...”

“... Gothic buttresses to the back range. A floor divides the hall into two storeys and a homely Queen Anne front with apricot stucco and dark green-blue paint looks out on the lawns and shrubberies. I lost my heart to this history-stored house and long to know the succession of its owners ... From Wilcotes we descended to Finstock, which begins at the bottom of ...”

“... Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control measures. ‘We must have population control ...”

“... And with the cinema too music is often the most powerful stimulant: I watched The Diary of Anne Frank for a time without tears until the arrival of some soupy music left me with two sodden handkerchiefs. So I am manifestly one of a host in whom tears are a cheap commodity. It always surprises me, therefore, when intelligent people talk with ...”

“... up at the same time, such as Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras in France and Monique Laederach and Anne-Lise Grobéty in Switzerland. She did not. ‘I don’t like women’s books,’ she said in 2004. ‘They go on about marriage, divorce, emotional states, children’; their authors have ‘nothing to say’. When asked to name a book she liked by a ...”

“... War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of solidarity ...”

“... as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar ...”

“... her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride ...”

“... In jeans with rips at the knee, red and black running trainers and a caramel jumper, he has brown-grey swept-up hair and tanned skin with a few wrinkles. He takes me to a corner sitting room with a lit fire; a small clock on the mantelpiece, flanked by two candlesticks with pink candles, will chime the hours. Larta brings me a cup of tea in a mug ...”

“... our values’ was aspirational rather than factual. As Beck makes clear, when it came to fighting brown-skinned barbarians – whether in the Black Hills of Dakota, the Philippine jungle, or the Mekong Delta – torture was as American as cherry pie.Many Americans (including myself) believed Obama would bring an end to the Bush administration’s ...”