“... a research institute under Abel Aganbegyan’s National Institute of the Economy. Others included Alexander Shokhin, who had been economic adviser to Eduard Shevardnadze while the latter was foreign minister; Anatoly Chubais, economic adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; Konstantin Kagalovsky, who set up an Institute of the Market with ...”

“... seem, in view of its much more spectacular neighbours like Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander or Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, to be a dull choice. Indeed this rather intimate picture is an exception for Bassano himself, who produced much more spectacular paintings, one of which, a tumultuous Nativity in the National Gallery of Scotland, at ...”

“... but he was scathing of its anti-democratic character, hobbled powers and the vapid Blair-Brown vision of the mayor as a hybrid impresario-manager. It was, he thought, ‘a bloody stupid idea’.It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Livingstone that both the abolition of the GLC and the weakness of its reconstituted successor were a reaction to his ...”

“... literature in the life of the country. ‘The USSR has lost its spiritual goal, its ideal,’ said Alexander Mikhailov, an official of the Writers’ Union and editor of Literary Workshop: Our revolution overthrew not only the Tsar but throne and God together. In place of God, the people were offered the world revolution and the victory of Communism. But ...”

“... their names. The catchy subtitle ‘A Brownshirt in 1938’ of course implies that Waldheim was a Brown-shirt – an unproven allegation. Much worse than these flippancies, though, is the downright tendentious chapter heading, ‘In Salonika during the Deportations’: collaboration in the deportation of the 50,000 Jews of Salonika – in the knowledge of ...”

“... on the kitchen table or stacked in cabin-sized bedrooms are hundred of books, all covered in brown paper with their Hindi titles inscribed in schoolmasterly ink. Beside the school is the Irish Presbyterian Church, and beside it is a grave. It contains the remains of the Revd Alexander Fyvie, who died here in 1840, aged ...”

“... group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with meaning. What do you mean by that, more precisely?’ She smiles.For this ...”

“... The answer, I think, can be found in The Second Defence, where Milton attacks his Royalist enemy Alexander More, supposed author of The Clamour [or Cry] of the Royal Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides. Answering this ‘very effective polemic’, as Lewalski describes it, Milton dismisses More as the ‘barren windy egg’ (‘ovum hoc irritum ...”

“... British commanders had just eight transport helicopters, the big twin-rotor Chinooks. Gordon Brown was attacked in the British press for cutting back on earlier plans to buy more. In fact, Brown was responsible for telling the MoD how much it had to spend overall; the decision to cut helicopter expansion was taken by ...”

“... whites – and it was a winning formula. Reagan easily defeated the colourless liberal Pat Brown, whom he accused of coddling the Black Panthers and the Berkeley protesters.Yet once he became governor Reagan revealed his pragmatic side, partly by surrounding himself with moderate advisers and keeping the Birchers at bay. He opened access to abortion ...”

“... unhappily out the window, her eyes filled with tears.’ We look on as Mabel styles ‘her light brown hair into a series of upsweeps’, as she scrutinises ‘the small worry lines’ that mark ‘her otherwise smooth porcelain skin’. We watch her ‘walking carefully down the stairs in a pair of high-heeled shoes’. We’re told that she chose her dress ...”

“... with the infidel Saracens and Turks. When the Carmelites came back from a Crusade in 1254 wearing brown and white striped robes – a funky new fashion picked up in the Ottoman East – they were immediately made to renounce them by Papal edict. Medieval laws often required that social outcasts – thieves, traitors, prostitutes, lepers, madmen, hangmen ...”

“... hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were long, sometimes fulsome, always ...”

“... bridge into the river Ingul. Grapevines shaded the walled yards of cottages painted pink and brown and blue.I wouldn’t have seen the signs that the Russians had been through the village – and come under Ukrainian fire – if Tatiana, an official from the Peresadivka hromada, hadn’t given me a tour. The old pontoon bridge blown up. The shot-up door ...”

“... later in its story. ‘The protocol is not to talk about it at all publicly.’ But, as Bonnie Brown, a masseuse at Google in the early days, wrote in her memoir, ‘a sharp contrast developed between Googlers working side by side. While one was looking at local movie times on their monitor, the other was booking a flight to Belize for the weekend. How was ...”